INDIAN WRITING IN ENGLISH
THOUGHT THE PARACLETE
As some bright archangel in vision flies
Plunged in dream-caught spirit immensities,
Past the long green crests of the seas of life,
Past the orange skies of the mystic mind
Flew my thought self-lost in the vasts of God.
Sleepless wide great glimmering wings of wind
Bore the gold-red seeking of feet that trod
Space and Time's mute vanishing ends. The face
Lustred, pale-blue-lined of the hippogriff,
Eremite, sole, daring the bourneless ways,
Over world-bare summits of timeless being
Gleamed; the deep twilights of the world-abyss
Failed below. Sun-realms of supernal seeing,
Crimson-white mooned oceans of pauseless bliss
Drew its vague heart-yearning with voice sweet.
Hungering, large-souled to surprise the unconned
Secrets white-fire-veiled of the last Beyond,
Crossing power-swept silences rapture-stunned,
Climbing high far ethers eternal-sunned,
Thought the great-winged wanderer Paraclete
Disappeared slow-singing a flame-word rune.
Self was left, lone, limitless, nude, immune.
Plunged in dream-caught spirit immensities,
Past the long green crests of the seas of life,
Past the orange skies of the mystic mind
Flew my thought self-lost in the vasts of God.
Sleepless wide great glimmering wings of wind
Bore the gold-red seeking of feet that trod
Space and Time's mute vanishing ends. The face
Lustred, pale-blue-lined of the hippogriff,
Eremite, sole, daring the bourneless ways,
Over world-bare summits of timeless being
Gleamed; the deep twilights of the world-abyss
Failed below. Sun-realms of supernal seeing,
Crimson-white mooned oceans of pauseless bliss
Drew its vague heart-yearning with voice sweet.
Hungering, large-souled to surprise the unconned
Secrets white-fire-veiled of the last Beyond,
Crossing power-swept silences rapture-stunned,
Climbing high far ethers eternal-sunned,
Thought the great-winged wanderer Paraclete
Disappeared slow-singing a flame-word rune.
Self was left, lone, limitless, nude, immune.
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CRY THE BELOVED COUNTRY
The Reverend Stephen Kumalo, a poor black Anglican parson, lives with his wife in the small village of Ndotsheni in South Africa. Many of his relatives have moved to Johannesburg, a huge and dangerous city, never to be heard from again: his brother, his son, and his sister are the most missed. Johannesburg is the place where many poor black people have gone to try to earn a living, since there are gold mines there. The countryside is over-plowed, but the cities are overcrowded. Black people have been kept poor by the few, but greedy, white people in South Africa, and now many black people have turned to crime. Yet there are also many people, both white and black, striving for change, for justice.
One day Stephen gets a letter from a parson in Johannesburg. Reverend Msimangu writes that Stephen's sister Gertrude is sick. Stephen also wants to know what has happened to his son, Absalom, in Johannesburg, so he agrees to go there, although it will be very expensive.
In Johannesburg, Stephen finds that his sister has become a prostitute. She repents when she meets him, and moves into the place he is staying, near Msimangu's Mission House. Stephen and Msimangu become good friends as they search for Absalom, though it becomes increasingly clear that Absalom has not been leading a good life. Then, a respected white man named Arthur Jarvis, who worked for racial equality, is murdered by black boys. Arthur was raised near Ndotsheni, so Stephen knows him and his father by sight, and is very upset about the murder. As it turns out, Absalom is the killer, though he had two accomplices, one of whom is Matthew, the son of Stephen's brother John. Absalom feels terrible about what he has done, and vows to only tell the truth from now on. But Matthew and the other boy lie, saying that they were not part of the murder. The judge believes them, and Absalom is sentenced to hang alone. This is in spite of the great efforts of the church in Johannesburg, who help Stephen so much-with prayer, money, and advice-that he is overcome with gratitude. Msimangu, especially, does everything he can to help Stephen, though he brushes off any thanks, saying that God is directing him, that is all. Stephen tries not to fall into despair over the hopelessness of his situation, and reaches out to the needy people around him. Gertrude has a son, and when she eventually runs away from the Mission House at night, Stephen takes over his care. Absalom has a lover who is pregnant, and Stephen brings the girl to live with himin Johannesburg, then takes her back to Ndotsheni. She is a source of joy for him, because she was leading an immoral life, but with his direction, has become a kind and good person.
Meanwhile, Stephen meets James Jarvis, Arthur's father, by accident. James, who never cared much about political issues, has been reading his son's writing. He commits to a life of justice and compassion, inspired by his dead son's words. He also pities Stephen, who comes from a poor village, and has been broken by the wickedness of those close to him. James can see that Stephen, too, believes kindness and truth to be all-important. James begins to help Ndotsheni. He sends a teacher there to help them understand how to grow successful crops. He pays for a new church to be built. He buys milk for the young children who need it. Though they are not friends-Jarvis is a reserved man who does not display emotions easily-they help each other recover fromtheir losses. Though Stephen is old, he knows that the land will one day be restored. This comforts him more than anything, because he loves his beautiful land deeply. Throughout his terrible journey, it comforts him and gives him strength.
Major Characters
Stephen Kumalo: Main character of the story. A pastor who takes his relationship with God and the state of South Africa very seriously. He sees that the poverty, injustice, and lack of morality in his country is threatening to become irreversible. He loves his beautiful land, and worries over what will happen to it. He also loves its people-both blacks and whites. Though he recognizes that white people are responsible for some of South Africa's problems, he does not hate them as a group. More than anything, he loves his own family. When he finds out that his son has become part of everything he hates about South Africa, it nearly kills him. He also berates himself for his own failings: at times he is jealous, selfish, or angry, and he hates himself for it. But his belief in the goodness of God, and the individual kindness he encounters, renew his spirit. He is a kind and gentle man who is repeatedly challenged by the cruelty and brutality of the world around him.
John Kumalo: Stephen Kumalo's younger brother. He moved to Johannesburg and now owns a successful carpenter's shop. Though he speaks out for justice for the 'natives' (black South Africans, who are overwhelmingly poor, and make up the vast majority of citizens) he is also afraid. He loves hismoney and power, loves that people will listen tohim, but knows that if he says anything too controversial he will be put in prison. He is one of the country's great orators, but he never lets his speeches get too intense. His instinct for self-preservation is too high, and it makes him afraid to endanger himself, even for a good cause. It also makes him lie to get his son out of trouble-even if that means making things worse for Stephen and his own son, Absalom.
Absalom Kumalo: Stephen Kumalo's only child. He went to Johannesburg to find Stephen's sister, but never returned or even wrote to his parents. When Stephen finds him, he has been thrown out of several houses for bad behavior, spent time in a reformatory, gotten a young girl pregnant, and, just when he seemed to be turning his life around, robbed and murdered a kind, well-respected white man. Absalom is young, immature, and irresponsible, but being caught, paradoxically, brings out the best in him. He admits to the murder, and tells the truth from then on. He somberly accepts the fact that his 'friends' deny being at the murder scene. Though he is terrified of his execution, he eventually comes to terms with it, and arranges for all of his money to be given to his child when it is born. He slowly becomes an adult. This may be the only positive effect of the way he has lived: for the most part, he has acted foolishly, and in many ways, his life seems pointless. This is something very difficult for his father to accept.
Theophilus Msimangu: Stephen's greatest friend in the novel. He is the one who informs Stephen of his sister's immoral life in Johannesburg, finds him a place to stay there, and goes to great lengths to help him find his son. He relates well to Stephen, because both of them grapple with feelings they consider sinful. Msimangu often says that he himself is not a good man, but God has put His hands on him. Stephen is comforted by his friend's warm, genuine, generous nature, and they talk freely together, even though they haven't known each other long.
Arthur Jarvis: A respected, just, kind-hearted white man, who desperately wanted to help bring justice to South Africa. He revered Abraham Lincoln, and was a learned and thoughtful man. He was well-loved by black and white South Africans alike. Absalom Kumalo and two friends murdered Jarvis while robbing his house. Thus, Arthur is at the center of the tragedy of the book: he who was trying to help poor black people avoid lives of crime, was murdered by a young black man who was not altogether bad, just corrupted by the system Arthur was trying to change.
James Jarvis: Arthur Jarvis's father. He has never concerned himself much with the 'natives'-he was rich enough not to have to see them except as servants-but when his son dies he makes an effort to understand his life's work. Reading his son's speeches and essays, he is moved by the problems between black and white South Africans, and this leads him to try to help Stephen Kumalo's village. He gives up his feelings of hate and fear, and steadfastly acts only in compassion.
Minor Characters
Mrs. Kumalo: Stephen's wife. She is never named, and this reveals some of her role in the story. She is a kind, understanding, long-suffering woman, but she has little identity apart from her husband. She is a good wife: she takes care of her husband, loves her son desperately, and wants to do right in the world. She, like her husband, knows that South Africa is largely a destroyed country, and sees that her village is crumbling. Yet unlike Stephen's, her thoughts are never revealed to the reader. She merely grieves over these things quietly.
Gertrude Kumalo: Stephen's sister. She is twenty-five years younger than he, and much less responsible. On some level she would like to be 'good'-to settle down, take care of her son, work consistently and give back to her community-but she doesn't know how to do this. She suggests that she might become a nun, but then disappears from the house, never to be seen again. No one really knows where she has gone, but it seems doubtful that she has joined a convent.
Sibeko: His daughter has gone to Johannesburg, and has not been heard from for a year. Sibeko is worried and asks Stephen to find out about her for him. She worked for Margaret Jarvis' niece, who fired her because she was acting immorally. The niece says that she does not care where Sibeko's daughter is now.
Mrs. Lithebe: A kind, patient, upright religious woman, who boards Kumalo and takes care of him, Gertrude, Gertrude's son, and Kumalo's daughter-in-law. She tries to teach the two women to lead moral lives, and she has a deep respect for Kumalo, because she can tell he is a good man.
Father Vincent: Father Vincent is a foreign Anglican priest who befriends Stephen at the Sophiatown Mission House. He helps Stephen by praying with him and helping him think about peaceful things including the beauty of the land. Eventually, Father Vincent also helps Stephen find a lawyer when Stephen finds his son in prison.
Gertrude's son: Though Gertrude neglects him and he is a quiet, serious boy, Kumalo loves playing with him, and making him laugh. When Gertrude leaves Mrs. Lithebe's house secretly, the boy asks about her at first, but soon forgets her. He happily moves to Ndotsheni.
Matthew Kumalo: Son of John Kumalo, cousin of Absalom, and nephew of Stephen. He was with Absalom when he robbed and killed Arthur, but does not admit it. He is protected by his father. Neither of them are willing to accept that they have dodged responsibility, laying it at the feet of their more honest relatives.
Dubula: A friend of John Kumalo, and part of his political circle. He, according to Msimangu, is the one that the white people are most afraid of, because he is not afraid. He will do anything for justice-even sacrifice himself.
Mrs. Mkize: She housed Absalom and Matthew Kumalo. She is a sullen, fearful woman who will not admit to her own role in her tenants' immoral lives.
Pleasant-faced man: A white man who works at the reformatory at which Absalom stayed. He cares about Absalom, but he is also cynical. He is angry with both Absalom and himself when he finds out that Absalom has gone back to an immoral lifestyle. Yet he still tries to help him, for Stephen's sake as well as his son's.
The girl: Absalom's lover, the mother of his child. She is simple, and does not expect much from the world. Her 'immorality' seems to come more from this than from actual wickedness: she lives with a man unmarried, but she commits no crimes that the reader knows of. When Kumalo takes her under his wing, she is grateful, and wants nothing more than to be a good, respectful daughter-in-law.
Mr. Carmichael: The lawyer who defends Absalom for free. A somber, upright man, he is interested only in truth and justice. He wants to do his job well, and advance the standing of black South Africans. He is not concerned with being friendly.
Margaret Jarvis: She was closer to her son Arthur than her husband was, and she is devastated by his death. She understood what he was trying to do, and she supports James in trying to continue their son's efforts. Still, she was sick before her son died, and his murder is too much for her to bear: she dies soon after.
Johannes Pafuri: The third boy who broke into Arthur Jarvis' house. Though Johannes chose the time and the place for the robbery, and used the iron bar to knock out the servant, he denies all of this. When the judge finds in his favor, Johannes is pleased and self-righteous, as though this is just.
The chief: A self-important, proud man who is more concerned with displaying his power than with learning about ways to help Ndotsheni. He brushes off Kumalo, then tries to impress Jarvis, probably because he is a rich white man, more than because he wants to restore Ndotsheni.
The small white boy: Arthur Jarvis' son, and James Jarvis' grandson. He is mature, intelligent, and good-natured. He comes to see Ndotsheni and talks freely with Stephen, laughing easily and bringing joy to the priest. Yet when he hears that children are starving in Ndotsheni, he goes to his grandfather and asks him to give milk to the village. He is a happy, carefree boy, but he understands grief and struggle also.
The agricultural demonstrator: James Jarvis pays him to come to Ndotsheni and help the villagers learn to work the land successfully. He is happy to do it, because he wants money for himself, and independence from white people for his own people. He loves his country and wants to see it restored.
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KANTHAPURA
-Raja Rao
Raja Rao's novel Kanthapura (1938) is the first major Indian novel in English. It is a fictional but realistic account of how the great majority of people in India lived their lives under British rule and how they responded to the ideas and ideals of Indian nationalism. The book has been considered by many to be the first classic modern Indian writing in English and is thought of as one of the best, if not the best, Gandhian novels in English.
Kanthapura - The Village:
'Kanthapura' portrays the participation of a small village of South India in the national struggle called for by Mahatma Gandhi. Imbued with nationalism, the villagers sacrifice all their material possessions in a triumph of the spirit, showing how in the Gandhian movement people shed their narrow prejudices and united in the common cause of the non-violent civil resistance to the British Raj.
This village is a microcosm of the traditional Indian society with its entrenched caste hierarchy. In Kanthapura there are Brahmin quarters, Sudra quarters and Pariah quarters. Despite stratification into castes, however, the villagers are mutually bound in various economic and social functions which maintain social harmony. The enduring quality of the Indian village is represented as ensuring an internal tenacity that resists external crises, its relationship to past contributing a sense of unity and continuity between the present and past generations. Kanthapura may appear isolated and removed from civilization, but it is compensated by an ever-enriching cycle of ceremonies, rituals, and festivals.
Rao depicts the regular involvement of the villagers in Sankara-Jayanthi, Kartik Purnima, Ganesh-Jayanthi, Dasara, and the Satyanarayana Puja with the intention of conveying a sense of the natural unity and cohesion of village society. Old Ramakrishnayya reads out the Sankara-Vijaya day after day and the villagers discuss Vedanta with him every afternoon. Religion, imparted through discourses and pujas (prayers), keeps alive in the natives a sense of the presence of God. Participation in a festival brings about the solidarity among them. The local deity Kenchamma protects the villagers "through famine and disease, death and despair". If the rains fail, you fall at her feet. Equally sacred is the river Himavathy which flows near Kanthapura.
The Strategic Setting of the Novel:
Rao's choice of this village setting is strategic in view of his Gandhian loyalties. Gandhi locates his politics in the villages of India where the majority of Indian's population resides. Rao maintains the sanctity of the village at an ideological level, but permits mobility and change to heighten the historical significance of the national struggle Gandhi conceptualized.
The time when the action of the novel is set is the 1920s and 1930s, the period when Mahatma Gandhi had become the pivotal figure in India's struggle for freedom. Rao treats the history of the freedom movement at the level of hostility between village folk and the British colonial authority at a time when colonialism had become intensely heavy-handed in its response to the Civil Disobedience Movement.
Kanthapura is an enchanting story of how the independence movement becomes a tragic reality in a tiny and secluded village in South India. The novel has the flavor of an epic as it emerges through the eyes of a delightful old woman who comments with wisdom and humor.
Kanthapura - The Village:
'Kanthapura' portrays the participation of a small village of South India in the national struggle called for by Mahatma Gandhi. Imbued with nationalism, the villagers sacrifice all their material possessions in a triumph of the spirit, showing how in the Gandhian movement people shed their narrow prejudices and united in the common cause of the non-violent civil resistance to the British Raj.
This village is a microcosm of the traditional Indian society with its entrenched caste hierarchy. In Kanthapura there are Brahmin quarters, Sudra quarters and Pariah quarters. Despite stratification into castes, however, the villagers are mutually bound in various economic and social functions which maintain social harmony. The enduring quality of the Indian village is represented as ensuring an internal tenacity that resists external crises, its relationship to past contributing a sense of unity and continuity between the present and past generations. Kanthapura may appear isolated and removed from civilization, but it is compensated by an ever-enriching cycle of ceremonies, rituals, and festivals.
Rao depicts the regular involvement of the villagers in Sankara-Jayanthi, Kartik Purnima, Ganesh-Jayanthi, Dasara, and the Satyanarayana Puja with the intention of conveying a sense of the natural unity and cohesion of village society. Old Ramakrishnayya reads out the Sankara-Vijaya day after day and the villagers discuss Vedanta with him every afternoon. Religion, imparted through discourses and pujas (prayers), keeps alive in the natives a sense of the presence of God. Participation in a festival brings about the solidarity among them. The local deity Kenchamma protects the villagers "through famine and disease, death and despair". If the rains fail, you fall at her feet. Equally sacred is the river Himavathy which flows near Kanthapura.
The Strategic Setting of the Novel:
Rao's choice of this village setting is strategic in view of his Gandhian loyalties. Gandhi locates his politics in the villages of India where the majority of Indian's population resides. Rao maintains the sanctity of the village at an ideological level, but permits mobility and change to heighten the historical significance of the national struggle Gandhi conceptualized.
The time when the action of the novel is set is the 1920s and 1930s, the period when Mahatma Gandhi had become the pivotal figure in India's struggle for freedom. Rao treats the history of the freedom movement at the level of hostility between village folk and the British colonial authority at a time when colonialism had become intensely heavy-handed in its response to the Civil Disobedience Movement.
Kanthapura is an enchanting story of how the independence movement becomes a tragic reality in a tiny and secluded village in South India. The novel has the flavor of an epic as it emerges through the eyes of a delightful old woman who comments with wisdom and humor.
Telling of the Novel:
As far as the form and technique of the novel is concerned Rao makes a deliberate attempt to follow traditional Indian narrative technique and it is Indian sensibility that informs Kanthapura. In fact both the spirit and the narrative technique of Kanthapura are primarily those of the Indian Puranas, which may be described as a popular encyclopaedia of ancient and medieval Hinduism, religious, philosophical, historical and social. Rao at the outset describes his novel as a sthala-purana - legend of a place. The Puranas are a blend of narration, description, philosophical reflection, and religious teaching. The style is usually simple, flowing, and digressive.
Rao makes a highly innovative use of the English language to make it conform to the Kannada rhythm. In keeping with his theme in Kanthapura he experiments with language following the oral rhythms and narrative techniques of traditional models of writing. The emotional upheaval that shook Kanthapura is expressed by breaking the formal English syntax to suit the sudden changes of mood and sharp contrasts in tone. While the intuitive borrowing from language takes place at one level in the novel, at another interconnected level, "real" India is constructed by enshrining the novel in Gandhian ideology. It is a highly original style. The author's "Foreword" to the novel almost spells out the postcolonial cultural agenda:
The telling has not been easy. One has to convey in a language that is not one's own the spirit that is one's own. One has to convey the various shades and omissions of a certain though-movement that looks maltreated in an alien language. I use the word 'alien', yet English is not really an alien language to us. It is the language of our intellectual make-up-like Sanskrit or Persian was before- but not of our emotional make-up. We are all instinctively bilingual, many of us writing in our own language and in English. We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians.
Rao's novel is significant as a cultural tract which rewrites true history against the "inauthentic" historical accounts compiled by Europeans, and because it effects a cultural revival through the use of indigenous themes and motifs. Rao is also alive to the fact that religion has the potential to move people beyond dormancy - to display active political energy to the extent of sacrificing their lives. Kanthapura evokes a sense of community and freedom, construed as a spiritual quality which overcomes all bounds and crosses all barriers.
In order to allow an easy interchange between the world of men and the world of gods, between contemporaneity and antiquity, Rao thus equips his story with a protagonist whose role it is to enthuse the villagers into joining the political cause of India's struggle for freedom without reservation.
The tension between these two often contradictory levels of writing - the mythic/poetic and the political/prosaic - is the defining characteristic of the novel. As will be seen, this tension is both a strength and a weakness to the narrative; on the one hand enhancing its sheer readability as a story, and on the other hand blurring readers' understanding of the realities of the Indian Independence struggle.
Moorthy and other Characters - Raja Rao's Tools in Telling:
He focuses on two individual leaders and their beliefs; the actual and the mythicized figure of Gandhi, and his transmutation into Moorthy, the saintly hero of the novel. As the movement reaches Kanthapura, young Moorthy, son of a Brahmin woman, Narasamma, takes up the responsibility of spreading Gandhi's message. He brings about cultural awakening among the villages by organizing harikathas ("tales of gods"). By a subtle subversion the harikatha is turned into an allegory of India's struggle for freedom wherein the Gandhian saga is inscribed. Moorthy visits the city, and returns a "Gandhi man". He has become a spokesman for Gandhi, by submitting to his attitudes and beliefs. The villagers describe him as "our own Gandhi", yet interestingly he never has an actual meeting with Gandhi. He has only seen him in a "vision" addressing a public meeting with himself pushing his way through the crowd and joining the band of volunteers and receiving inspiration by a touch of Gandhi's hand. This enables Rao to turn the historical moment into a visionary experience, and opens a space for the possibility of assumed politics.
Moorthy preaches and practices ahimsa (non-violent resistance), the hallmark of Gandhi's appeal to the public, and evokes an overwhelming response among the villagers who unite in common cause, ready to break the British laws, picket toddy shops, and fight against social evils like untouchability.
Moorthy has several sympathetic souls with him: Rangamma, the kind lady and a patron for harikatha celebrations, Ratna, the young widowed daughter of Kamalamma, Rangamma's sister, Patel Range Gowda, the revenue collector, and others. But there are also sceptics, like the foul mouthed Venkamma. His own mother is much concerned about Moorthys mixing with the low caste pariahs. Indeed, when someone spreads the rumour that the Swami - the priest; upholder of dharma - has threatened the villagers with excommunication if Moorthy continues to go around with the pariahs, Naraamma is terribly upset; she sobs and shivers and soon dies.
He has to resist orthodoxy at the social level, and at the political level he has to fight the British authority symbolized by the Skeffington Coffee Estate and the police inspector Bade Khan who is out to suppress any undercurrent of Gandhian movement in Kanthapura. Moorthy's efforts bear fruit and the village changes. Rao is careful to point out that the transformation occurs through a complex dynamism negotiated through tradition and change, as the village affiliates itself to wider nationalistic cause.
The British find their ally in Swami, who supports them as upholders of dharma and is rewarded with "twelve hundred acres of wet land" by the Government. Meanwhile Moorthy's message spreads far and wide and several private temples are thrown open to the untouchables.
Rao does not marginalize the role of women in the freedom movement and highlights their individual contributions. Rangamma and Ratna form women's volunteer groups, despite opposition from the orthodox. Moorthy and his volunteers closely monitor the Mahatma's Dandi march and enact their own satyagraha in Kanthapura. They picket toddy shops, and are joined by more volunteers from the city, and by the coolies from the Skeffington Coffee Estate. Their march is opposed by the police who beat them up mercilessly. The police tell them to be loyal to the British Government, but the people say they know only the Government of the Mahatma. Moorthy and several others are arrested. As a result of the police atrocities the entire village is desolate and, in the end, "there remains neither man nor mosquito in Kanthapura".
Conclusion:
Kanthapura has been described as the most satisfying of all modern Indian novels. Recognized as a major landmark in Indian fiction, it is the story of how the Gandhian struggle for Independence came to one small village in south India.
"There is more to Raja Rao's book than a morality tale. It is written in an elegant style verging on poetry; it has all the content of an ancient Indian classic, combined with a sharp satirical wit and a clear understanding of the present. The author's extensive notes (printed as an appendix) will prove invaluable to the general reader." - New York Times
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A HANDFUL OF RICE
Kamala Markandaya’s novel A Handful of Rice is one of the first novels to exemplify the plight of rural peasants to the new urban lifestyle. She traces the path of the antagonist in the novel, Ravi, a rural peasant who moved to the city to escape the vicious cycle of starvation in his village. When he moves to the city he befriends an orphan who grew up in the city. Ravi's life becomes full of robberies, alcohol, and prostitutes. He sleeps on the sidewalk and eats perhaps one meal a day. Things change when Ravi falls in love with Nalini, the daughter of a man he robs. Ravi begins to change his ways and begins working for Apu, Nalini’s father. Ravi marries Nalini and realizes that even while working, it is very difficult to make a decent living. Ravi becomes obsessed with greed and constantly battles between going back to his old way of life with easy money and freedom and living a middle class life. Markandaya conveys the stress of society’s standards through Jayamma, Nalini’s mother. Jayamma never seems to care about the hardships their family encounters but is more concerned that the neighbors do not find out about their struggles. As Ravi and Nalini have children, financial stresses increase and Ravi becomes more stingy and greedy. He then associates with his old gang friends and starts to abuse Nalini. Finally, Ravi is forced to choose between his money and his son, a choice that in the end claims his fate.
Whereas in A Handful of Rice, Markandaya wrestles with issues of social hierarchy, in the novel Shalimar she accurately portrays two parallel societies in India. The main character, Rikki, is introduced to both of these societies during his adolescence. Rikki was born into the life of fishing. His father, brother, and cousins were all fisherman. However, at a young age his entire family falls victim to the might of the sea. Rikki is taken in by a family of missionaries. These new guardians show Rikki a completely new life. Markandaya shows that the presence of both cultures has painted the beautiful picture of what has become India. This novel depicts the evolution and development of Indian society and culture by describing the changes of Shalimar. This novel is a nice addition to her already extensive list of work.
THE DYING EAGLE
The theme is loss of power with age and the inevitability of younger generations overthrowing the old
Poem Analysis
Does this poem belong to a certain genre?
A narrative elegy with an underlying theme with emphasis on the death of the Eagles reign
Poem Analysis
poetic structure
mixture of movement of feelings, feeling great v. feeling defeated.
Sequence of chronological events beginning and ending with the crag, past v. future
5 distinct stanzas tell the story of the Eagle's descent into death and loss of his crown
A progression of the stanzas tells us the story
Poem Analysis
setting
A forest surrounds a wall of crags that house the Eagle as he surveys his kingdom
A period of unheard strength entering into nature never before.
What do you think that this "invader" truly is? How might its image have so effected the Eagle?
What character(s) in King Lear have the characteristics of the invader? What effect did such character(s) possess on Lear?
Poem Analysis
Characterization
The speaker has no definite character, the owl and the invader symbolize the tragic hero and the new experience
the eagle is large. Holds great pride in his past, his children and his throne. The invader is large, dark eyed and metallic. It shears through the eagle's domain with more ease than he could ever complete
Compare the mental state of the Eagle with that of King Lear. Do you see any similarites, contrasts?
Poem Analysis
Diction
carrion -> a corpse or body dead
morraines -> a deposit of material on the ground
suzerain -> sovereign state, crown
archipelages -> a body of water
aquiline -> shaped like a beak
bedraggled -> appears dirty or soiled
bereft -> to be without, lacking or emptiness
fledgling -> a baby bird
supercilous -> acting as though one is superior to the other
monarch -> a empiral leader
Andes -> mountain range
Poem Analysis
Images and symbols
" Marked the strange bat-like shawdow.."
A simile, comparing the actions of the invader with that of the bat, known for its long sings and stillness as it soars through the air
"a sight which galvanized his back, bristled the feathers on his kneck, and shot little runnels of dust where his talons dug recesses in the granite"
This is personification of the Eagle as he feels an emotion or adrenaline rush described in a such a way that would be seen with humans. This makes him easily connected with the reader to understand his emotions and the imagery involved.
Keeping in mind both Lear and the Eagles suffering, how might symbolism might have played a role in their lives?
galvanized his back... bristled his feathers... he climbed the orbit with swift and easy undulations... sloven shoulders... nerveless claws"
"cut through the aquiline cominion"
Poem Analysis
Prosody
Lines are devided to contain a complete thought and to set off a strong image of the eagle and the invader
It does not use rhyme
Line lengths are irregular, lots of enjambents as well
Compare the changes that the eagle goes through in the poem to the changes that Lear goes through in the play. Do you notice any significant similarities?
Poem Analysis
Point of View
Third person omniscient, the speaker explains the feels and the sights of the eagle but does not show any direct involvement with the story
The speaker is not involved at all, only to explain the feels and experience of the eagle. It's descriptiions envoke emotions in the reader creating a trustworthy account with some sympathy in the description alone.
Poem Analysis
tone
The tone is bold, suggesting leadership and regal behaviours. It turns to defensive, curious. Then to aggression and finally ends with surrender and defeat.
THE ALMIGHTY QUIZ
What do you believe is the figure that the Eagle sees? What does it represent?
Why did the author find it necessary to say that the eagle "outlived all his rivals"?
What do you think is repesented by the imagery of the old eagle on the crag (hole, ledge or a cliff)?
Why do you think the author chose an eagle for this poem?
Do you think that imagery is used properly and effectively in this poem? Why or why not?
Literary Critisicm
Freudian
King Lear and The Eagle
Over time new generations will overpower the old in ways that inflict mental anguish and physical depression leading to the former generation's exile or death.
The oldest hath borne most. We that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.
(5.3. 325-26)
Writing Task :D
In the voice of the Eagle, write a eulogy to King Lear. Express opinions, experiences, biases and lessons that he may have learnt and the tragedies that connected the two of them.
Battles and relationships defined who he was
I.D, impulse driven. Quick to examine the intruder, always wanting to maintian his right as King.
The Pain of being upstaged ousted him from his throne. Broke his spirit. This effected how he saw his family, his home, his life up until this point and his kingdom
The writer is influenced by age, losing face and dealing with life crisis
There is a variation of conscious levels throughout the poem; conscious in the description of the sighting of the invader. Preconscious as he ponders his life accomplishments, family and the trials that made him great
Repression Mechanism: retreating into himself unwilling to awknoledge the shattering of his pride and will.
Ego: he satisfied his love, pleasure and power to a point he found pride in his accomplishments.
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APPROACHES TO LITERATURE
LITERATY MOVEMENTS
This is a list of modern literary movements: that is, movements after the Renaissance. These terms, helpful for curricula or anthologies, evolved over time to group writers who are often loosely related. Some of these movements (such as Dada and Beat) were defined by the members themselves, while other terms (the metaphysical poets, for example) emerged decades or centuries after the periods in question. Ordering is approximate, as there is considerable overlap.
§ Romantic fiction written in the 18th and 19th centuries.
§ 17th century English royalist poets, writing primarily about courtly love, called Sons of Ben (after Ben Jonson).
§ 1800 to 1860 century movement emphasizing emotion and imagination, rather than logic and scientific thought. Response to the Enlightenment.
§ Fiction in which Romantic ideals are combined with an interest in the supernatural and in violence.
American Romanticism
§ Distinct from European Romanticism, the American form emerged somewhat later, was based more in fiction than in poetry, and incorporated a (sometimes almost suffocating) awareness of history, particularly the darkest aspects of American history.
§ 19th century, primarily English movement based ostensibly on undoing innovations by the painter Raphael. Many were both painters and poets.
§ 19th century American movement: poetry and philosophy concerned with self-reliance, independence from modern technology.
§ 19th century American movement in reaction to Transcendentalism. Finds man inherently sinful and self-destructive and nature a dark, mysterious force.
§ Late-19th century movement based on a simplification of style and image and an interest in poverty and everyday concerns.
§ Notable authors: Gustave Flaubert, William Dean Howells, Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Leo Tolstoy, Frank Norris and Eça de Queiroz
§ Also late 19th century. Proponents of this movement believe heredity and environment control people.
§ Principally French movement of the fin de siècle based on the structure of thought rather than poetic form or image; influential for English language poets from Edgar Allan Poe to James Merrill.
§ Early-20th century fiction consisting of literary representations of quotidian thought, without authorial presence.
§ Variegated movement of the early 20th century, encompassing primitivism, formal innovation, or reaction to science and technology.
§ It was traditionally attributed to Gertrude Stein and was then popularized by Ernest Hemingway in the epigraph to his novel The Sun Also Rises, and his memoir A Moveable Feast. It refers to a group ofAmerican literary notables who lived in Paris and other parts of Europe from the time period which saw the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression.
§ Touted by its proponents as anti-art, dada focused on going against artistic norms and conventions.
First World War Poets
§ Poets who documented both the idealism and the horrors of the war and the period in which it took place.
§ A Mexican vanguardist group, active in the late 1920s and early 1930s; published an eponymous literary magazine which served as the group's mouthpiece and artistic vehicle from 1928-1931.
§ Poetry based on description rather than theme, and on the motto, "the natural object is always the adequate symbol."
§ African American poets, novelists, and thinkers, often employing elements of blues and folklore, based in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the 1920s.
§ Originally a French movement, influenced by Surrealist painting, that uses surprising images and transitions to play off of formal expectations and depict the unconscious rather than conscious mind.
§ A group of Southern American poets, based originally at Vanderbilt University, who expressly repudiated many modernist developments in favor of metrical verse and narrative. Some Southern Agrarians were also associated with the New Criticism.
§ Mid-20th century poetry and prose based on seemingly arbitrary rules for the sake of added challenge.
§ A self-identified group of poets, originally based at Black Mountain College, who eschewed patterned form in favor of the rhythms and inflections of the human voice.
§ A literary movement in postcolonial India (Kolkata) during 1961-65 as a counter-discourse to Colonial Bengali poetry.
§ Poetry that, often brutally, exposes the self as part of an aesthetic of the beauty and power of human frailty.
§ Literary movement in which magical elements appear in otherwise realistic circumstances. Most often associated with the Latin American literary boom of the 20th century.
§ A diverse, loosely connected movement of writers from former colonies of European countries, whose work is frequently politically charged.
§ Notable authors: Jamaica Kincaid, V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, Giannina Braschi, Wole Soyinka
§ This ongoing movement launched in 1969 based in Calcutta, by the Prakalpana group of Indian writers in Bengali literature, who created new forms of Prakalpana fiction, Sarbangin poetry and the philosophy of Chetanavyasism, later spreads world wide.
§ A literary movement founded in the late 1960s by René Philoctète, Jean-Claude Fignolé, and Frankétienne centered around the idea that the universe is interconnected, unpredictable, and governed by chaos.
§ A postmodern literary movement where writers use their speaking voice to present fiction, poetry, monologues, and storytelling arising in the 1980s in the urban centers of the United States.
§ A late-20th and early 21st century movement in American poetry advocating a return to traditional accentual-syllabic verse.
§ This is the lasting viral component of Spoken Word and one of the most popular forms of poetry in the 21st century. It is a new oral poetry originating in the 1980s in Austin, Texas, using the speaking voice and other theatrical elements. Practitioners write for the speaking voice instead of writing poetry for the silent printed page. The major figure is American Hedwig Gorski who began broadcasting live radio poetry with East of Eden Band during the early 1980s. Gorski, considered a post-Beat, created the term Performance Poetry to define and distinguish what she and the band did. Instead of books, poets use audio recordings and digital media along with television spawning Slam Poetry and Def Poets on television and Broadway.
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MODERN FICTION
PROSE FICTION.
The period saw the beginning, among other things, of English prose fiction of something like the later modern type. First appeared a series of collections of short tales chiefly translated from Italian authors, to which tales the Italian name 'novella' (novel) was applied. Most of the separate tales are crude or amateurish and have only historical interest, though as a class they furnished the plots for many Elizabethan dramas, including several of Shakespeare's. The most important collection was Painter's 'Palace of Pleasure,' in 1566. The earliest original, or partly original, English prose fictions to appear were handbooks of morals and manners in story form, and here the beginning was made by John Lyly, who is also of some importance in the history of the Elizabethan drama. In 1578 Lyly, at the age of twenty-five, came from Oxford to London, full of the enthusiasm of Renaissance learning, and evidently determined to fix himself as a new and dazzling star in the literary sky. In this ambition he achieved a remarkable and immediate success, by the publication of a little book entitled 'Euphues and His Anatomie of Wit.' 'Euphues' means 'the well-bred man,' and though there is a slight action, the work is mainly a series of moralizing disquisitions (mostly rearranged from Sir Thomas North's translation of 'The Dial of Princes' of the Spaniard Guevara) on love, religion, and conduct. Most influential, however, for the time-being, was Lyly's style, which is the most conspicuous English example of the later Renaissance craze, then rampant throughout Western Europe, for refining and beautifying the art of prose expression in a mincingly affected fashion. Witty, clever, and sparkling at all costs, Lyly takes especial pains to balance his sentences and clauses antithetically, phrase against phrase and often word against word, sometimes emphasizing the balance also by an exaggerated use of alliteration and assonance. A representative sentence is this: 'Although there be none so ignorant that doth not know, neither any so impudent that will not confesse, friendship to be the jewell of humaine joye; yet whosoever shall see this amitie grounded upon a little affection, will soone conjecture that it shall be dissolved upon a light occasion.' Others of Lyly's affectations are rhetorical questions, hosts of allusions to classical history, and literature, and an unfailing succession of similes from all the recondite knowledge that he can command, especially from the fantastic collection of fables which, coming down through the Middle Ages from the Roman writer Pliny, went at that time by the name of natural history and which we have already encountered in the medieval Bestiaries. Preposterous by any reasonable standard, Lyly's style, 'Euphuism,' precisely hit the Court taste of his age and became for a decade its most approved conversational dialect.
In literature the imitations of 'Euphues' which flourished for a while gave way to a series of romances inaugurated by the 'Arcadia' of Sir Philip Sidney. Sidney's brilliant position for a few years as the noblest representative of chivalrous ideals in the intriguing Court of Elizabeth is a matter of common fame, as is his death in 1586 at the age of thirty-two during the siege of Zutphen in Holland. He wrote 'Arcadia' for the amusement of his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, during a period of enforced retirement beginning in 1580, but the book was not published until ten years later. It is a pastoral romance, in the general style of Italian and Spanish romances of the earlier part of the century. The pastoral is the most artificial literary form in modern fiction. It may be said to have begun in the third century B. C. with the perfectly sincere poems of the Greek Theocritus, who gives genuine expression to the life of actual Sicilian shepherds. But with successive Latin, Medieval, and Renaissance writers in verse and prose the country characters and setting had become mere disguises, sometimes allegorical, for the expression of the very far from simple sentiments of the upper classes, and sometimes for their partly genuine longing, the outgrowth of sophisticated weariness and ennui, for rural naturalness. Sidney's very complicated tale of adventures in love and war, much longer than any of its successors, is by no means free from artificiality, but it finely mirrors his own knightly spirit and remains a permanent English classic. Among his followers were some of the better hack-writers of the time, who were also among the minor dramatists and poets, especially Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge. Lodge's 'Rosalynde,' also much influenced by Lyly, is in itself a pretty story and is noteworthy as the original of Shakespeare's 'As You Like It.'
Lastly, in the concluding decade of the sixteenth century, came a series of realistic stories depicting chiefly, in more or less farcical spirit, the life of the poorer classes. They belonged mostly to that class of realistic fiction which is called picaresque, from the Spanish word 'picaro,' a rogue, because it began in Spain with the 'Lazarillo de Tormes' of Diego de Mendoza, in 1553, and because its heroes are knavish serving-boys or similar characters whose unprincipled tricks and exploits formed the substance of the stories. In Elizabethan England it produced nothing of individual note.
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MODERN DRAMA
Modern English Drama
The glorious days of the Elizabethan drama were followed by a long period of decline and eclipse. The post-Elizabethan vainly endeavored to capture the graces of Shakespeare and other illustrious predecessors, while the heroic tragedies and the comedy of love and intrigue during the Restoration hardly added any glorious chapter to the history of English dramatic literature. Goldsmith and Sheridan attempted a partial revival in the eighteenth century, but their sporadic brilliance was followed by a spell of darkness which spread for almost a century, for between 1779, the year of the performance of Sheridan’s last important play, and 1876 when Pinero’s first play was staged, English drama was practically barren. The later eighteenth century witnessed the rise of great actors but not great playwrights. And it is an accepted rule that when acting flourishes drama languishes. Melodramatic, sensational and unrealistic plays alone were popular. A play was written not with a view to depicting life and character but for providing sufficient scope for the lusty lungs of the declamatory actor. Play writing was done mostly by hack writers, who sacrificed both art and realism in trying to eke out a living by writing to the dictates of theatre managers, producers and actors.
English drama was at very low ebb when T.W. Robertson, a playwright and actor, appeared on the scene, fully alive to the lack of realism and low artistic tone of the drama of his day he determined to import realism into drama and raise its artistic level. The year 1865, which witnessed the performance of his play. Society, proved a landmark in the revival of the English stage. The revival manifested itself in stress on realism both in subject matter and technique. In place of types and stock characters Robertson presented individual men and women, person of flesh and blood. In the matter of technique and form he discarded blank verse and rhetoric in favor of natural and human speech. Robertson however was not a bold or revolutionary spirit and he could not divest himself of the old traditions, such as romantic melodrama. He, therefore, failed to exercise any substantial influence on his contemporaries and the much needed reform in drama required a more daring literary genius.
The darling genius was found, to some extent, in Arthur Wing Pioner and H. A. Jones who made pretty serious efforts to drive away undiluted romanticism from the English stage. An expert craftsman Pinero had the courage to introduce several innovations in dramatic technique. In his The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, produced in 1893, he played the pioneer in discarding the ‘soliloquy’ and the ‘aside’ along with certain other old stage conventions, thus bringing drama closer to life. Pinero and Jones, however, he could not be sufficiently darling to ignore bublic taste altogether. Though Jones wrote in his preface toSaints and Sinner (1884) that playwriting should not be merely the art of sensational and spectacular illusion but mainly and chiefly the art of representing English life, he could not avoid, in his plays, theatrical excitement and too much use of coincidence just to humor the audience. Hence, the realism of these, dramatists was skin deep not the genuine stuff which subsequent playwrights were to provide.
The person who infused real new revolutionary blood into English drama was Henrik Ibsen, a Norwegian playwright. He was introduced to English audiences by J. T. Grein, a Dutchman, in 1890. In England, William Archer, the famous dramatic critic, enthusiastically espoused Ibsen’s cause. Through Ibsen’s genuine realism was introduced in English plays, Ibsen’s characters are drawn from ordinary life and characterization in his plays receives more attention than the patching up of a well-knit plot. Moreover, the plot in his plays is essentially psychological leaving little room for pure action or incident. The Ibsenion play is essentially a drama of ideas, of characters swayed with ideas and struggling against the forces of convention and society. Ibsen’s ideas gave a rude shock to the susceptibilities of his contemporaries, but he was bold enough to stick to his theories and technique. Consequently, he exercised a great influence all over the continent and the drama of ideas of revolt against society and convention came to stay. The tyranny of the star system and the stranglehold of the commercial minded theater managers could do no longer throttle true dramatic art. The renaissance of modern drama was in full swing with the advent of Ibsen.
If William Archer propagated the plays of Ibsen, it was Shaw who imported the real Ibsen spirit into English Drama. Highly original and independent in many ways, Shaw was immensely influenced by the plays of Ibsen and, like him, he became a champion of conferring the new freedom of subject-matter and technique on English drama. Since the appearance of his first play Widowers Houses in 1892, Shaw strode on the English stage like a versatile Titan almost till the end of his days. Among modern English dramatists, he proved the most zealous advocate o f rationalism and realism, brushing aside Victorian cobwebs, a proper climate for a drama of ideas, englarging the dramatists vision and, above all, slowly forging an appreciative and responsive intellectual audience for his problems plays. The volume of his dramatic production is so wide and varied that it is not possible within this limited space to do justice to the great services which he rendered to British drama. His Arms and the Mans, Candida, Man Superman Saint Joan, to mention only some of his best plays, brought English drama again into its own and provided inspiration and guidance to other playwright.
“I always have to preach”, observed Shaw. “My plays all have a purpose.” The plays of Shaw are inspired by a conscious iconoclastic Galsworthy___the two other great luminaries in the firmament of modern drama___gave a version of realism in their work, which has no touch of the partisan spirit or the zeal of the propagandist. Their realism has been described as naturalism i.e. an attempt to present “both fair and foul, no more no less.” The naturalistic play is intended to be objective and impersonal, though both Galsworthy and Barker could not be absolutely dispassionate. Both were revolutionaries in their own way. Barker revolting against the tyranny of Victorian convention over the individual, and Galsworthy against the heartless but mighty social forces which crush the individual. Barker expounds the ideal of self-realization, which Galsworthy strives to make out a case for tolerance and mutual understanding and accommodation.
Shaw’s realism and the naturalism of Barker and Galsworthy have to be distinguished further. Shaw is essentially an intellectual, cold, penetrating, satirical, often flippant, but the latter have nothing of the imp or the mountebank in them. Moreover they do not banish emotion from their plays. Shaw is essentially a talker and his plays about in discussion and a display of with but both Galsworthy and Barker subordinate sheer with and talk to the possibilities of life and the strong undercurrent of emotion which eventually sways human life. Both deal with problems, mostly social in character, but despite all his legal training, Galsworthy is the more didactic of the two. Whereas Galsworthy tries to rub his moral home. Barker leaves the public to drawits own moral. Nevertheless, in all his best plays___Strife, Justice, The Skin Game, Loyalties___Galsworthy shows himself at once a great artist and a great critic of society, far more balanced, reserved and impartial than Shaw.
The popularity of realism and naturalism did not oust the romantic element altogether from the domain of modern drama. Realism stimulates the brain but a touch of romanticism vivifies the heart. “The lies of romance relieve the tedium of everyday life.” It was J. M. Barrie, a Scottish novelist, who provided the lies of romance by turning his face away from drab and cruel reality. He found solace in magic isles and imaginary dream islands, Gifted with a child’s fancy and make-belief, he was at best with children. And it is a children’s play, Peter Pane (1904) in which he is at his best. Among his other plays, mention may be made ofQuality Street (1903), which centers round a sweet love story full of his peculiar charm, humor and pathos, smiles and tears. The Admirable Circhton, what Every Woman Knows, Dear Brutus, Mary Rose are all plays for removed from realism, presenting impossible characters, who behave impossibly. Barrie created a new type of play, which can best be described as “Barriesque”, a blending of romance, whimsicality and quaintness. A perfect master of technique, he produced plays which despite all their fantasy and romance, are compact and well-knit. Summing up his contribution to modern drama, Lynton Hudson observes: “In an age of growing cynicism he guarded the guttering flame of Romance and kept it from being quenched by intellectualism.”
No account of modern British drama can be complete without a reference to the Irish Movement and the Provincial Repertory Movement. The new Irish Theater was founded in 1892 by a group of prominent Irish writers with W. B. Yeats at their head. Later on, Miss, A. E. Horniman, a wealthy English woman, joined this group of writers and provided funds with which the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, was constructed.
The Irish Movement, also know as Celtic Revival, was essentially national in character, and concentrated on Irish themes and ideas. It also aimed at reforming the stage and turning it into a thing of beauty. The movement, however, was not intended to espouse the cause of realism or naturalism. Lynton Hudson, describing this aspect to the movement, observes: “It did not think of a play as either a sermon or a debate, not as intellectual at all as appealing primarily to the brain. It was not intended to make people think, but to make them feel to give them an emotional and spiritual uplifting such as they might experience at mass in a cathedral or at the performace of a symphony.”
Owing to these aims and ideals the Irish playwright turned to the past of their country, its myths and legends. In a sense, their approach was romantic and poetical. In his plays, Yeats glorified the national myths and legends and depicted primitive human emotions. Essentially a poet, he gave beautiful ideas and first-rate lyrical poetry but failed in characterization and plot construction. His contribution to drama lies essentially in the realism of poetry and symbolism.
The Irish Movement also inspired a new type of native comedy drawing its inspiration from Irish folk-lore and Irish peasantry. The best exponent of this comedy was the talented J. M. Synge (1871-1909), whom Yeats discovered in Paris, wasting his genius as a journalist, Synge drew his inspiration largely from the simple fishermen of the Aran Isles. There he saw human nature both at its best and at its worst. He also picked up the native speed and picturesque idiom of these people. Synge’s best comedies are in the Shadow of the Glen, the Tinker’s Wedding and particularly The Playboy of the Western World. The last was at once recognized to be his masterpiece after its performance at the London Theater in 1907. Syngealso wrote a few tragedies, the best of which in Riders to the Sea (1904).
Synge wrote six plays. His dramatic work is limited but it is of such a high order that his place in British drama is assured for all times to come. “Synge had, like Shakespeare,” writes Hudson, “not only a sure dramatic instinct and a keen insight into the motive forces of human character, but also the gift of transmuting pathos and ugliness into poetry and beauty, and the exuberance inseparable from all great geniuses. Like Shakespeare, he never moralizes, he is a dramatist pure and simple. He had no sympathy with the didactic school of drama.”
Miss Horniman, who had financed the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, also found money to start a repertory theatre in Manchester in 1907. Since then the provincial repertory theatre has played a significant role in both English and American drama. It became the chief centre for producing talented playwrights and actors. Other theatres notably the Liverpool Playhouse (1911), slowly came into existence. Unlike the Irish Theatre, the Manchester and other English theatres were not intended to arouse or revive local nationalism, nor were they inspired by the poetic and symbolic aspects of life. Their drama was highly realistic and intellectual__in line with the work of Ibsen and Shaw. It did much to popularize the drama of idea and represent the social life both of the rich and the poor of the highly industrialized towns of Manchester and Birmingham. This drama was, of course, naturalistic and photographic but a bit too serious, even grim. “A night in a repertory theatre”, wrote St. John Ervine, “was almost as cheerful as a night in a morgue. People went to repertory theatres as some Dissenters formerly went to chapel, woebegonely and as if they came to atone for lamentable sins.”
An important phase of modern drama is found in the revival of the poetic drama along side of the naturalistic and realistic plays. The plays of Yeats were poetic to a certain extent but the Irish Theatre eventually drifted from poetry towards realism. In England poetic drama found its first exponent in Stephen Philiphs, whose blank verse plays enjoyed considerable popularity in the first years of the century. Stephen Philips possessed considerable dramatic genius, but his poetic talent was not equally high. So he failed to work a revival of poetic drama.
It were John Drink water and John Mansfield who brought about the actual revival of poetic drama. Drinkwater did not attempt to write in blank verse and thus escaped comparison with the great Shakespeare. He produced four poetic plays, but used both prose and verse in them. Finally he gave up poetic drama altogether and wrote only in prose. Finally he gave up poetic drama altogether and wrote only in prose. His masterpiece is Abraham Lincoln a play on the life of the American president. His other plays___Cramwell and Mary Stuart__are also historical, but they didn’t __come up to the level of Abraham Lincoln.
Masefield chose at first biblical or historical subjects and experimented with various lyric metres, including the rhymed couplet, but he finally evolved a poetic idiom in prose like Wordsworth’s like Synge, he forged a new pattern of rhythmic speech, terse, figurative and rooted in the soil. His characters are simple, rustic folk. His best play is The Tragedy of Nan which presents a picture of rustic cruelty, though it is not without a certain element of tragic grandeur. The play though written in prose is essentially poetic.
Among other exponents of poetic drama John Flecker, with his oriental play Hassan, deserves special mention. It is written in highly colored prose, but it is, like Masefield’s Nan steeped in the spirit of poetry. Lawrence Binyon, Lord Dunsany, Gordromon Bottomley and T.S.Eliot have also attempted poetic drama. T.S. Eliot’s Murder in The Cathederal has proved a success, but the plays of the others have failed to elicit much appreciation.
There are some of the main tendencies and types of modern drama. Though the momentum of dramatic revival has not kept up a uniform pace during the century its future is not dark. What it will be in they ears to come is not altogether impossible to visualize. “One can only guess what form the new drama will assume when it eventually finds its equilibrium.” Priestly is not alone in thinking that it will be more closely allied with music and the ballet. One thing is sure: it must recover some of the things that it has lost, the obvious beauties of romance and poetry. It may be, as Galsworthy predicted, lyrical, and its province to describe the elemental soul of man and forces of Nature with beauty ad the spirit of discovery. It will most likely to be a swing-back of the pendulum that oscillates eternally between Romance and Realism. The fallacy of Realism, as James Branch Cabell has put it, “is that it assumes our mileposts to be as worthy of consideration as our goal: and that the especial post we are now passing reveals an eternal verity.”
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LITERARY CRITICISM AND THEORY
Literary Theory and Criticism
Literary theory and literary criticism are interpretive tools that help us think more deeply and insightfully about the literature that we read. Over time, different schools of literary criticism have developed, each with its own approaches to the act of reading.
Schools of Interpretation
Cambridge School (1920s–1930s): A group of scholars at Cambridge University who rejected historical and biographical analysis of texts in favor of close readings of the texts themselves.
Chicago School (1950s): A group, formed at the University of Chicago in the 1950s, that drew on Aristotle’s distinctions between the various elements within a narrative to analyze the relation between form and structure. Critics and Criticisms: Ancient and Modern (1952) is the major work of the Chicago School.
Deconstruction (1967–present): A philosophical approach to reading, first advanced by Jacques Derrida that attacks the assumption that a text has a single, stable meaning. Derrida suggests that all interpretation of a text simply constitutes further texts, which means there is no “outside the text” at all. Therefore, it is impossible for a text to have stable meaning. The practice of deconstruction involves identifying the contradictions within a text’s claim to have a single, stable meaning, and showing that a text can be taken to mean a variety of things that differ significantly from what it purports to mean.
Feminist criticism (1960s–present): An umbrella term for a number of different critical approaches that seek to distinguish the human experience from the male experience. Feminist critics draw attention to the ways in which patriarchal social structures have marginalized women and male authors have exploited women in their portrayal of them. Although feminist criticism dates as far back as Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and had some significant advocates in the early 20th century, such as Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir, it did not gain widespread recognition as a theoretical and political movement until the 1960s and 1970s.
Psychoanalytic criticism: Any form of criticism that draws on psychoanalysis,the practice of analyzing the role of unconscious psychological drives and impulses in shaping human behavior or artistic production. The three main schools of psychoanalysis are named for the three leading figures in developing psychoanalytic theory: Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Jacques Lacan.
· Freudian criticism (c. 1900–present): The view of art as the imagined fulfillment of wishes that reality denies. According to Freud, artists sublimate their desires and translate their imagined wishes into art. We, as an audience, respond to the sublimated wishes that we share with the artist. Working from this view, an artist’s biography becomes a useful tool in interpreting his or her work. “Freudian criticism” is also used as a term to describe the analysis of Freudian images within a work of art.
· Jungian criticism (1920s–present): A school of criticism that draws on Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, a reservoir of common thoughts and experiences that all cultures share. Jung holds that literature is an expression of the main themes of the collective unconscious, and critics often invoke his work in discussions of literary archetypes.
· Lacanian criticism (c. 1977–present): Criticism based on Jacques Lacan’s view that the unconscious, and our perception of ourselves, is shaped in the “symbolic” order of language rather than in the “imaginary” order of prelinguistic thought. Lacan is famous in literary circles for his influential reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.”
Marxist criticism: An umbrella term for a number of critical approaches to literature that draw inspiration from the social and economic theories of Karl Marx. Marx maintained that material production, or economics, ultimately determines the course of history, and in turn influences social structures.These social structures, Marx argued, are held in place by the dominant ideology, which serves to reinforce the interests of the ruling class. Marxist criticism approaches literature as a struggle with social realities and ideologies.
· Frankfurt School (c. 1923–1970): A group of German Marxist thinkers associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. These thinkers applied the principles of Marxism to a wide range of social phenomena, including literature. Major members of the Frankfurt School include Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas.
New Criticism (1930s–1960s): Coined in John Crowe Ransom’s The New Criticism (1941), this approach discourages the use of history and biography in interpreting a literary work. Instead, it encourages readers to discover the meaning of a work through a detailed analysis of the text itself. This approach was popular in the middle of the 20th century, especially in the United States, but has since fallen out of favor.
New Historicism (1980s–present): An approach that breaks down distinctions between “literature” and “historical context” by examining the contemporary production and reception of literary texts, including the dominant social, political, and moral movements of the time. Stephen Greenblatt is a leader in this field, which joins the careful textual analysis of New Criticism with a dynamic model of historical research.
New Humanism (c. 1910–1933): An American movement, led by Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, that embraced conservative literary and moral values and advocated a return to humanistic education.
Post-structuralism (1960s–1970s): A movement that comprised, among other things, Deconstruction, Lacanian criticism, and the later works of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. It criticized structuralism for its claims to scientific objectivity, including its assumption that the system of signs in which language operates was stable.
Queer theory (1980s–present): A “constructivist” (as opposed to “essentialist”) approach to gender and sexuality that asserts that gender roles and sexual identity are social constructions rather than an essential, inescapable part of our nature. Queer theory consequently studies literary texts with an eye to the ways in which different authors in different eras construct sexual and gender identity. Queer theory draws on certain branches of feminist criticism and traces its roots to the first volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1976).
Russian Formalism (1915–1929): A school that attempted a scientific analysis of the formal literary devices used in a text. The Stalinist authorities criticized and silenced the Formalists, but Western critics rediscovered their work in the 1960s. Ultimately, the Russian Formalists had significant influence on structuralism and Marxist criticism.
Structuralism (1950s–1960s): An intellectual movement that made significant contributions not only to literary criticism but also to philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and history. Structuralist literary critics, such as Roland Barthes, read texts as an interrelated system of signs that refer to one another rather than to an external “meaning” that is fixed either by author or reader. Structuralist literary theory draws on the work of the Russian Formalists, as well as the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure and C. S. Peirce.
Literary Terms and Theories
Literary theory is notorious for its complex and somewhat inaccessible jargon. The following list defines some of the more commonly encountered terms in the field.
Anxiety of influence: A theory that the critic Harold Bloom put forth in The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973). Bloom uses Freud’s idea of the Oedipus complex (see below) to suggest that poets, plagued by anxiety that they have nothing new to say, struggle against the influence of earlier generations of poets. Bloom suggests that poets find their distinctive voices in an act of misprision, or misreading, of earlier influences, thus refiguring the poetic tradition. Although Bloom presents his thesis as a theory of poetry, it can be applied to other arts as well.
Canon: A group of literary works commonly regarded as central or authoritative to the literary tradition. For example, many critics concur that the Western canon—the central literary works of Western civilization—includes the writings of Homer, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and the like. A canon is an evolving entity, as works are added or subtracted as their perceived value shifts over time. For example, the fiction of W. Somerset Maugham was central to the canon during the middle of the 20th century but is read less frequently today. In recent decades, the idea of an authoritative canon has come under attack, especially from feminist and postcolonial critics, who see the canon as a tyranny of dead white males that marginalizes less mainstream voices.
Death of the author: A post-structuralist theory, first advanced by Roland Barthes, that suggests that the reader, not the author, creates the meaning of a text. Ultimately, the very idea of an author is a fiction invented by the reader.
Diachronic/synchronic: Terms that Ferdinand de Saussure used to describe two different approaches to language. The diachronic approach looks at language as a historical process and examines the ways in which it has changed over time. Thesynchronic approach looks at language at a particular moment in time, without reference to history. Saussure’s structuralist approach is synchronic, for it studies language as a system of interrelated signs that have no reference to anything (such as history) outside of the system.
Dialogic/monologic: Terms that the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin used to distinguish works that are controlled by a single, authorial voice (monologic) from works in which no single voice predominates (dialogic or polyphonic). Bakhtin takes Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky as examples of monologic and dialogic writing, respectively.
Diegesis/Mimesis: Terms that Aristotle first used to distinguish “telling”(diegesis) from “showing” (mimesis). In a play, for instance, most of the action is mimetic, but moments in which a character recounts what has happened offstage are diegetic.
Discourse: A post-structuralist term for the wider social and intellectual context in which communication takes place. The implication is that the meaning of works is as dependent on their surrounding context as it is on the content of the works themselves.
Exegesis: An explanation of a text that clarifies difficult passages and analyzes its contemporary relevance or application.
Explication: A close reading of a text that identifies and explains the figurative language and forms within the work.
Hermeneutics: The study of textual interpretation and of the way in which a text communicates meaning.
Intertextuality: The various relationships a text may have with other texts, through allusions, borrowing of formal or thematic elements, or simply by reference to traditional literary forms. The term is important to structuralist and poststructuralist critics, who argue that texts relate primarily to one another and not to an external reality.
Linguistics: The scientific study of language, encompassing, among other things, the study of syntax, semantics, and the evolution of language.
Logocentrism: The desire for an ultimate guarantee of meaning, whether God, Truth, Reason, or something else. Jacques Derrida criticizes the bulk of Western philosophy as being based on a logocentric “metaphysics of presence,” which insists on the presence of some such ultimate guarantee. The main goal of deconstruction is to undermine this belief.
Metalanguage: A technical language that explains and interprets the properties of ordinary language. For example, the vocabulary of literary criticism is a metalanguage that explains the ordinary language of literature. Post-structuralist critics argue that there is no such thing as a metalanguage; rather, they assert, all language is on an even plane and therefore there is no essential difference between literature and criticism.
Metanarrative: A larger framework within which we understand historical processes. For instance, a Marxist metanarrative sees history primarily as a history of changing material circumstances and class struggle. Post-structuralist critics draw our attention to the ways in which assumed met narratives can be used as tools of political domination.
Mimesis:Seediegesis/mimesis,above.
Monologic:Seedialogic/monologic,above.
Narratology: The study of narrative, encompassing the different kinds of narrative voices, forms of narrative, and possibilities of narrative analysis.
Oedipus complex: Sigmund Freud’s theory that a male child feels unconscious jealousy toward his father and lust for his mother. The name comes from Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex, in which the main character unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother. Freud applies this theory in an influential reading of Hamlet, in which he sees Hamlet as struggling with his admiration of Claudius, who fulfilled Hamlet’s own desire of murdering Hamlet’s father and marrying his mother.
Semantics: The branch of linguistics that studies the meanings of words.
Semiotics or semiology: Terms for the study of sign systems and the ways in which communication functions through conventions in sign systems. Semiotics is central to structuralist linguistics.
Sign/signifier/signified: Terms fundamental to Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralism linguistics. A sign is a basic unit of meaning—a word, picture, or hand gesture, for instance, that conveys some meaning. A signifier is the perceptible aspect of a sign (e.g., the word “car”) while the signified is the conceptual aspect of a sign (e.g., the concept of a car). A referent is a physical object to which a sign system refers (e.g., the physical car itself).
Synchronic:Seediachronic/synchronicabove.
===============
FEMINISM
Feminism originally was an expression used by suffragettes -who were predominantly pro-life[1][2][3]- to obtain the right for women to vote in the early 1900s in the United Statesand the United Kingdom. By the 1970s, however, liberals had changed the meaning to represent people who favored abortion and identical roles or quotas for women in the military and in society as a whole.
Specifically, a modern feminist denies or downplays differences between men and women, opposes the encouragement of homemaking and child-rearing for women, and seeks to participate in predominantly male activities, possibly including sexual intercourse with women. Most modern feminists:
§ in movies, portray the men as inherently evil, dumb or incompetent, and the women as inherently good, smart or competent (note that this conflicts with gender equality)
§ pretend that there are no meaningful differences between men and women when that advances liberal causes (e.g., women and men equally in military combat, to weaken the U.S. military), but reject equality when that results in more money to women (e.g., VAWA funding of women's groups)
§ believe marriage implies female servitude when it is in fact a mutual bond
§ distort historical focus onto female figures, often overshadowing important events (Eg: Henry VIII's wives take precedence in common knowledge to his actual reign.)
§ object to being addressed as "ma'am," or feminine nicknames such as "sweetheart" or "honey";[11] object to other female-only names, such as "temptress"
§ take offense at grammatical rules of the English language, like using the pronoun "he" when referring to a hypothetical/anonymous person, or phrases like 'fireman' and 'stewardess.'
HISTORY
Roots of the movement in the United States and the United Kingdom include the Women's Suffrage movement of the early 1900s and the Women's Liberation (or "Second Wave Feminist") movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
The Equal Rights Amendment, which proponents claimed would address the inadequacies of the Fourteenth Amendment concerning women and citizenship, was proposed in the US in 1923. The amendment passed Congress in 1972 but was ultimately defeated, falling just three states short of the required three-quarters majority on June 30, 1982. Some conservatives, particularly Phyllis Schlafly, felt that its passage would entail adverse consequences, including making girls subject to the military draft, requiring taxpayer-funded abortion the end of single-sex schools and classes, requiring the issuance of homosexual marriage licenses, and the revocation of laws that protect women in dangerous jobs, such as factory or mining work. Indeed, in states that passed their own state versions of ERA, several of these results were subsequently ordered by courts.[12]
The feminist movement in the West evolved in the 1980s with the rise of so-called Post-Feminism (also called "Third-Wave" feminism), which stresses that women have many rights that go unrecognized, often by women themselves, in everyday life, and in the American legal structure. Most members of the feminist movement support reproductive rights currently guaranteed by American law, including the legal right to abortion. This stance is opposed by many conservatives, leading political commentator Rush Limbaugh to coin the term "Femi-nazis" to refer to extreme feminist activists.
One of the major features of feminism prior to the 1990s was opposition to women being treated as sex objects. However, feminists today support women being sex objects, viewing it as a means of empowerment over the traditional Judeo-Christian family structure and conservative values. Continuing this same promotion of liberalism and anti-Christian values, feminists today treat Islam's cruel treatment of women as a matter of "personal choice".
During the administration of Bill Clinton, feminism made a partial resurgence, although feminist leadership was criticized[Who says?] for largely failing to criticize President Clinton's sexist behavior toward female employees as both Arkansas Governor and U.S. President.[13][14]
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a staunch advocate of civil rights and non-violence said, "When a mother has to work she does violence to motherhood by depriving her children of her loving guidance and protection." [15]
Larrey Anderson, philosopher, writer and submissions editor for American Thinker, links feminism to Marxism, and concludes, "Feminism by grounding itself in the philosophy of Hegel and Marx, is condemning women to a new servitude: slavery to the state."[16]
Quotations
Robin Morgan
§ "I feel that 'man-hating' is an honourable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them."[17]
§ "I haven't the faintest notion what possible revolutionary role white hetero-sexual men could fulfill, since they are the very embodiment of reactionary-vested-interest-power. But then, I have great difficulty examining what men in general could possibly do about all this. In addition to doing the sh*twork that women have been doing for generations, possibly not exist? No, I really don't mean that. Yes, I really do."[18][19]
§ "I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire."[21]
Andrea Dworkin
§ "The annihilation of a woman's personality, individuality, will, character, is prerequisite to male sexuality."[25]
Marilyn French
§ "As long as some men use physical force to subjugate females, all men need not. The knowledge that some men do suffices to threaten all women. He can beat or kill the woman he claims to love; he can rape women ... he can sexually molest his daughters ... THE VAST MAJORITY OF MEN IN THE WORLD DO ONE OR MORE OF THE ABOVE" - The War Against Women, p. 182 (her emphasis)[26]
§ "All patriarchists exalt the home and family as sacred, demanding it remain inviolate from prying eyes. Men want privacy for their violations of women ... All women learn in childhood that women as a sex are men's prey" - The War Against Women, p. 186 [27]
§ "The media treat male assaults on women like rape, beating, and murder of wives and female lovers, or male incest with children, as individual aberrations ... obscuring the fact that all male violence toward women is part of a concerted campaign" - The War Against Women, p. 21 [28]
In fiction authored by Marilyn French
§ My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach and I look briefly and walk on. I don't even need to shrug. I simply don't care. What he was, as a person, I mean, what his shames and yearnings were, simply don't matter" - The Women's Room
§ "All men are rapists and that's all they are" - The character Mia in her novel The Women's Room, p. 462[29]
Other
§ "The nuclear family must be destroyed ... Whatever its ultimate meaning, the break-up of families now is an objectively revolutionary process" - Linda Gordon
§ "Marriage has existed for the benefit of men; and has been a legally sanctioned method of control over women ... We must work to destroy it. The end of the institution of marriage is a necessary condition for the liberation of women. Therefore it is important for us to encourage women to leave their husbands and not to live individually with men ... All of history must be re-written in terms of oppression of women. We must go back to ancient female religions like witchcraft" (from "The Declaration of Feminism" November, 1971)
§ "The feminista agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians" - Pat Robertson, fundraising letter, 1992[30]
§ "I'm furious with the Women's Liberationists. They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming women are brighter than men. That's true, but it should be kept quiet or it ruins the whole racket" - Anita Loos
§ "Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex" - Valerie Solanas, author of the SCUM Manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men)
§ "The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness...can be trained to do most things" - Jilly Cooper
§ "Since marriage constitutes slavery for women, it is clear that the women's movement must concentrate on attacking this institution. Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage" - Sheila Cronin, the leader of the feminist organization NOW
§ "The institution of sexual intercourse is anti-feminist" - Ti-Grace Atkinson
§ "Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice" - Ti-Grace Atkinson
§ "It matters more what's in a woman's face than what's on it." - Claudette Colbert, quoted in Kindling the Spirit by Lois P. Frankel
§ "Rape is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear" - Susan Brownmiller; Authoress of Against Our Will p.6
§ "When a woman reaches orgasm with a man she is only collaborating with the patriarchal system, eroticizing her own oppression" - Sheila Jeffrys
§ "Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated" - Catharine MacKinnon
§ "All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman" - Catharine MacKinnon
§ "You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs" - Catharine MacKinnon (Prominent legal feminist scholar; Universities of Michigan & Yale)
§ "In a patriarchal society, all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent" - Catharine MacKinnon, quoted in Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women's Studies
§ "The more famous and powerful I get the more power I have to hurt men" - Sharon Stone, Actress
§ "Ninety-five percent of women's experiences are about being a victim. Or about being an underdog, or having to survive ... women didn't go to Vietnam and blow things up. They are not Rambo" - Jodie Foster, Actress - as quoted in The New York Times Magazine
§ "The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately 10% of the human race" - Sally Miller Gearhart, in The Future - If There Is One - Is Female
§ "And if the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual (male), it may be mainly a quantitative difference" - Susan Griffin, Rape: The All-American Crime
§ "If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males" - Mary Daly, former Professor at Boston College, 2001
§ "If anyone is prosecuted for filing a false report, then victims of real attacks will be less likely to report them" - David Angier
§ "To use the word [rape] carefully would be to be careful for the sake of the violator, and the survivors don't care a hoot about him. … They [men unjustly accused of rape] have a lot of pain, but it is not a pain that I would necessarily have spared them. I think it ideally initiates a process of self-exploration. 'How do I see women?' 'If I didn't violate her, could I have?' 'Do I have the potential to do to her what they say I did?' Those are good questions." - Catherine Comins, assistant dean of student life at Vassar in 1991 [31]
§ "I believe that women have a capacity for understanding and compassion which man structurally does not have, does not have it because he cannot have it. He's just incapable of it" - Barbara Jordan, former congresswoman
§ "Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release" - Germaine Greer
§ "Man-hating is everywhere, but everywhere it is twisted and transformed, disguised, tranquilized, and qualified. It coexists, never peacefully, with the love, desire, respect, and need women also feel for men. Always man-hating is shadowed by its milder, more diplomatic and doubtful twin, ambivalence" - Judith Levine, Authoress
§ "I feel what they feel: man-hating, that volatile admixture of pity, contempt, disgust, envy, alienation, fear, and rage at men. It is hatred not only for the anonymous man who makes sucking noises on the street, not only for the rapist or the judge who acquits him, but for what the Greeks called philo-aphilos, 'hate in love' for the men women share their lives with - husbands, lovers, friends, fathers, brothers, sons, co-workers." -Judith Levine, Authoress of My Enemy, My love
§ "There are no boundaries between affectionate sex and slavery in (the male) world. Distinctions between pleasure and danger are academic; the dirty-laundrylist of 'sex acts' ... includes rape, foot binding, fellatio, intercourse, auto eroticism, incest, anal intercourse, use and production of pornography, cunnilingus, sexual harassment, and murder" - Judith Levine; summarizing comment on the WAS document (A Southern Women's Writing Collective: Women Against Sex)
§ ((Delaney Nickerson, of the American Coalition for ABUSE AWARENESS, refers to the False Memory Syndrome Foundation as "The F---ing Molesters Society" (Miami Herald, April 3, 1995) The ACAA is a lobbying group, which includes Ellen Bass (co-author of THE COURAGE TO HEAL), and Rene Frederickson, leading feminist psychotherapist and strong proponent of repressed memory theory))
§ ((At the STONE ANGELS satanic ritual abuse conference in Thunder Bay in February, 1995, the following was contained in the handouts at a conference supported financially by the Ontario Government: FMS stands for: FULL OF MOSTLY SH*T; FOR MORE SADISM; FELONS, MURDERERS, SCUMBALLS; FREQUENT MOLESTERS SOCIETY))
§ "Women have their faults / men have only two: / everything they say / everything they do"[Citation Needed] -- Popular Feminist Graffiti
§ "I was, in reality, bred by my parents as my father's concubine... What we take for granted as the stability of family life may well depend on the sexual slavery of our children. What's more, this is a cynical arrangement our institutions have colluded to conceal" - Sylvia Fraser, Journalist
§ Catharine MacKinnon maintains that "the private is a sphere of battery, marital rape and women's exploited labor." In this way, privacy and family are reduced to nothing more than aspects of the master plan, which is male domination. Democratic freedoms and the need to keep the state's nose out of our personal affairs are rendered meaningless. The real reason our society cherishes privacy is because men have invented it as an excuse to conceal their criminality. If people still insist that the traditional family is about love and mutual aid - ideals which, admittedly, are sometimes betrayed - they're "hiding from the truth" The family isn't a place where battery and marital rape sometimes happen but where little else apparently does. Sick men don't simply molest their daughters, they operate in league with their wives to "breed" them for that purpose - Donna Laframboise; The Princess at the Window (in a critical explication of the Catharine MacKinnon, Gloria Steinem et al, tenets of misandric belief)
§ "If the classroom situation is very heteropatriarchal - a large beginning class of 50 to 60 students, say, with few feminist students - I am likely to define my task as largely one of recruitment ... of persuading students that women are oppressed" - Professor Joyce Trebilcot of Washington University, as quoted in Who Stole Feminism: How Women Have Betrayed Women
§ "Men, as a group, tend to be abusive, either verbally, sexually or emotionally. There are always the exceptions, but they are few and far between (I am married to one of them). There are different levels of violence and abuse and individual men buy into this system by varying degrees. But the male power structure always remains intact." - Message on FEMISA, responding to a request for arguments that men are unnecessary for a child to grow into mature adulthood.
§ Another posting on FEMISA: "Considering the nature and pervasiveness of men's violence, I would say that without question, children are better off being raised without the presence of men. Assaults on women and children are mostly perpetrated by men whom they are supposed to love and trust: fathers, brothers, uncles, grandfathers, step-fathers." (Both above quotes taken from Daphne Patai's excellent critical work,Heterophobia)
§ "At Brandies I discovered Feminism. And I instantly became a convert... writing brilliant papers in my Myths of Patriarchy class, in which I likened my fate as a woman to other victims throughout the ages."[Citation Needed] - Heather Hart 7
§ Here are 10 reasons why we are concerned about feminism and the National Organisation for Women
1. "The simple fact is that every woman must be willing to be identified as a lesbian to be fully feminist" - National NOW Times, January, 1988
2. "Since marriage constitutes slavery for women, it is clear that the women's movement must concentrate on attacking this institution. Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage" - feminist leader Sheila Cronan
3. In response to a question concerning China's policy of compulsory abortion after the first child, Molly Yard responded, "I consider the Chinese government's policy among the most intelligent in the world" - Gary Bauer, "Abetting Coercion in China" The Washington Times, Oct. 10, 1989
4. "Overthrowing capitalism is too small for us. We must overthrow the whole ... patriarch!" - Gloria Steinem, radical feminist leader, editor of Ms. Magazine
5. "Marriage has existed for the benefit of men; and has been a legally sanctioned method of control over women.... We must work to destroy it. The end of the institution of marriage is a necessary condition for the liberation of women. Therefore it is important for us to encourage women to leave their husbands and not to live individually with men ... All of history must be re-written in terms of oppression of women. We must go back to ancient female religions like witchcraft" (from "The Declaration of Feminism" November, 1971)
6. "By the year 2000 we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God" - Gloria Steinem, editor of Ms. Magazine)
7. "Let's forget about the mythical Jesus and look for encouragement, solace, and inspiration from real women ... Two thousand years of patriarchal rule under the shadow of the cross ought to be enough to turn women toward the feminist 'salvation' of this world" - Annie Laurie Gaylor, "Feminist Salvation," The Humanist, p. 37, July/August 1988
8. "In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them" - Dr. Mary Jo Bane, feminist and assistant professor of education at Wellesley College, and associate director of the school's Center for Research on Woman
9. "Being a housewife is an illegitimate profession... The choice to serve and be protected and plan towards being a family- maker is a choice that shouldn't be. The heart of radical feminism is to change that" - Vivian Gornick, feminist author, University of Illinois, The Daily Illini, April 25, 1981
10. "The most merciful thing a large family can to do one of its infant members is to kill it" - Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, in "Women and the New Race" p. 67
§ "Women's chains have been forged by men, not by anatomy." - Estelle R. Ramey
§ "I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "Our Girls"
§ "We are, as a sex, infinitely superior to men" - Elizabeth Cady Stanton, from her diary of December 27, 1890, quoting a letter she wrote. [32]
From 'A feminist Dictionary; ed. Kramarae and Triechler, Pandora Press, 1985:
§ MALE: ... represents a variant of or deviation from the category of female. The first males were mutants ... the male sex represents a degeneration and deformity of the female
§ MAN: ... an obsolete life form ... an ordinary creature who needs to be watched ...a contradictory baby-man ...
§ TESTOSTERONE POISONING: ... 'Until now it has been though that the level of testosterone in men is normal simply because they have it. But if you consider how abnormal their behavior is, then you are led to the hypothesis that almost all men are suffering from "testosterone poisoning"
§ Letter to editor: "Women's Turn to Dominate" "... Clearly you are not yet a free-thinking feminist but rather one of those women who bounce off the male-dominated, male-controlled social structures. Who cares how men feel or what they do or whether they suffer? They have had over 2000 years to dominate and made a complete hash of it. Now it is our turn. My only comment to men is: if you don't like it, bad luck - and if you get in my way I'll run you down" Signed: Liberated Women, Boronia Herald-Sun, Melbourne, Australia. 9 February, 1996
§ “Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism” - Catharine MacKinnon
§ "I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute."
=============
TEACHING OF ENGLISH IN INDIA
TEACHING ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE IN INDIA – A
INTRODUCTION
Every educational system has certain objectives which aim at bringing about desirable
changes in pupil. In order to bring about those changes, the institutions arrange
learning experience. The success of learning can be judged only in terms of the
changes brought about by this experience. This is a learning experience and
evaluation.
Thanks to the globalization in all the fields, it necessitates the learning of a language
which is international. Undoubtedly, English has become a world language rather than
the language of only the English speaking countries such as the UK and the USA
because the number of the people who use English as a means of communication
exceeds much more than the number of the people who speak it as their mother
tongue. In the case of English in India, more than two centuries, India has been
directly and indirectly had influence of the language , English on all the fields, such as
Education, Medical Science, etc.
Text materials relating to the subjects of Science, Engineering and Technology as also
Medicine are available only in English. Moreover, all over India, there is no single
language to unite the whole country. Since, in India, several languages are spoken
and also one set of people are reluctant to learn one common Indian language, we
have to borrow a new non-Indian language.
MJAL, vol: 1:1 February 2009 1:1 Teaching English as a second in India –a review Murali.M. 19
Considering the above facts, learning English, the universal language, as a Second
Language, becomes inseparable branch as also unavoidable in Indian education
system.
COMMON FACTORS AFFECTING TEACHING/LEARNING ENGLISH AS
A SECOND LANGUAGE
There are so many factors that affect the teaching-learning process in India. The
students in India can be categorized into two; the one is having the regional language
as medium of study from the primary level and the other is having English as the
medium of study. Hence, the problem of teaching English as a second language , to
the Indian students starts from the pre-schooling.
Further environment and family background play vital role in success of learning
process. For example, countries like India, where majority of the people are farmers,
have the poor background in education. Moreover, the income of majority of the
families is not adequate. Hence, the parents are not interested in giving good
education background to their children. In contrast, they are willing to engage the
children in some jobs in order to earn money. This is the very basic reason and the
affecting factor in teaching.
Secondly, the infrastructure, viz. school buildings – class rooms, labs, etc. is not
adequate as required. The first category of the students are almost compelled to
attend their classes under the trees even after several five year plans.
MJAL, vol: 1:1 February 2009 1:1 Teaching English as a second in India –a review Murali.M. 20
Majority of the students are coming from village and also their parents are farmers
and uneducated. If the nature fails, the survival of the farmers will be questionable.
Hence, the students are mentally discouraged due to the family conditions.
In the second category, the students are having enough background in basic education
since their parents are educated and they do not depend on the nature much. Many of
the students from second category are joining in English medium schools and hence,
they do not find much difficulty in pursuing their higher education.
Moreover majority of the families of second category are dwelling in towns and cities
and hence, they have easy access of quality education. But, the first category of
students are scoring good marks the examinations conducted. It proves that they are
having good writing skill in English. The only thing is that they have to be given
training in oral English communication also. Hence, a common programme for
English Language Teaching must be framed in the pre-schooling itself.
LEARNING A LANGUAGE
Each language is structured differently, and the different structures offer users
different suggestions to meaning. so when we learn our first language, our brain /
mind ‘tunes into’ the way the particular l1 works, and we learn to pay attention to
particular cues to meaning that are most helpful. When we meet a new language, our
brain / mind automatically tries to apply the first language experience by looking for
familiar cues.Part of learning a foreign language is developing new understandings
about the particular cues to meaning that the new language offers, and that differ from
those of our first language. The transferability of knowledge, skills and strategies
across languages depends closely on how the two written languages work.
MJAL, vol: 1:1 February 2009 1:1 Teaching English as a second in India –a review Murali.M. 21
ROLE OF A TEACHER
As said by Sir Philip Sydney, teaching is the end of all learning. A teacher’s primary
role is not only to enable the students to understand what he is intending to say or
teach. It is also the duty of the teacher to understand what the student wants and says.
In teaching-learning process, two things play the vital roles; one is the delivering
capacity of the teacher and the other one is the receiving capacity of the students.
Without the two aspects, the teaching-learning process will not be a successful one.
Teaching-learning process is just like making sound by clapping. Without two hands
we cannot clap. Like that without a right teacher and the students, the teachinglearning process is meaningless. Teaching should be a worthy of learning a concept
deeply and broadly. Teaching should facilitate the students to face the world which is
full of political, social, international as well as personal controversies, without fear. It
should give self-confidence to the students. By the effective teaching, the students
should be enabled to go for right choices, judgments and also decisions individually
In the process of teaching-learning, the teacher should try to understand the students
first. Then only, he can enable the students to understand him or his teaching.
Theory with practice on some of the teaching topics, may enable the students to
understand the concept easily. Success of a teacher in his/her attempt in enabling the
students to understand what is the concept taught by the teacher, depends on the
methods he/she applies.
The teacher may be a good, but the students’ physical problem may lead him to ignore
the teaching. Or sometimes, the background of family of the students may drive him
to be dull. Hence, the teacher should take into account everything
MJAL, vol: 1:1 February 2009 1:1 Teaching English as a second in India –a review Murali.M. 22
At the school level, the teaching-learning process is checked up the teacher by
repeated class tests and examinations. Based on the result (marks scored by the
students), different methods are adopted to improve teaching in case of negative
result. At the college levels also the same traditional (Macaulay) method of
examinations is used. The only difference is the volume of syllabus prescribed for the
colleges students will be more than that of the school level.
As Carl Rogers said, the teacher should first forget that she/he is a teacher. Instead,
she/he must possess the skills of a facilitator of learning-genuineness, prizing and
empathy.
TEACHING ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE
The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), U.S., defines English language
proficiency in this way:
A fully English proficient student is able to use English to ask questions, to
understand teachers, and reading materials, to test ideas, and to challenge what is
being asked in the classroom. Four language skills contribute to proficiency as
follows:
1. Reading - the ability to comprehend and interpret text at the age and gradeappropriate level.
2. Listening - the ability to understand the language of the teacher and instruction,
comprehend and extract information, and follow the instructional discourse through
which teachers provide information.
3. Writing - the ability to produce written text with content and format fulfilling
classroom assignments at the age and grade-appropriate level.
MJAL, vol: 1:1 February 2009 1:1 Teaching English as a second in India –a review Murali.M. 23
4. Speaking - the ability to use oral language appropriately and effectively in learning
activities (such as peer tutoring, collaborative learning activities, and question/answer
sessions) within the classroom and in social interactions within the school.
Hence, the teacher should keep in mind while teaching English as a second language
to the students.
LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY TESTS
Oller and Damico (1991) indicate that language proficiency tests can be associated
with three schools of thought. The first of these trends, the discrete point approach,
was based on the assumption that language proficiency:
...consisted of separable components of phonology, morphology, lexicon, syntax, and
so on, each of which could be further divided into distinct inventories of elements
(e.g., sounds, classes of sounds or phonemes, syllables, morphemes, words, idioms,
phrase structures, etc) (p. 82).
They describe language tests based on the discrete point approach in the following
way:
Following the discrete point model, a test could not be valid if it mixed several skills
or domains of structure (Lado, 1961). By this model, presumably the ideal assessment
would involve the evaluation of each of the domains of structure and each of the skills
of interest. Then, all the results could be combined to form a total picture of language
proficiency. (p. 82).
A discrete point language proficiency test typically uses testing formats such as
phoneme discrimination tasks where the test taker is required to determine whether or
not two words presented aurally are the same or different (e.g., /ten/ versus /den/). A
similar example might be a test designed to measure vocabulary which requires the
test taker to select the appropriate option from a set of fixed choices.
MJAL, vol: 1:1 February 2009 1:1 Teaching English as a second in India –a review Murali.M. 24
Technical/Business English for Engineers
Considering the all the above facts, the Anna University, Chennai has designed the
English syllabus for Engineering students comprises of the four skills as below;
a) Listening
b) Speaking
c) Reading
d) Writing
The subject title is "Technical English", a theory subject and "Communication Skills
Lab ", a practical subject. The former is taught to the first year students of the four
years engineering degree course and the lab course is conducted in second or third
year of the same students.
Technical English-Theory
The main objective of this course is to help students to develop listening skills for
academic and professional purposes.
1. To help students acquire the ability to speak effectively in English in real-life
situations.
2. To inculcate reading habit and to develop effective reading skills.
3. To help students improve their active and passive vocabulary.
4. To familiarize students with different rhetorical functions of scientific English.
5. To enable students write letters and reports effectively in formal and business
situations.
MJAL, vol: 1:1 February 2009 1:1 Teaching English as a second in India –a review Murali.M. 25
The lab training is given with the assistance of Networked Computers and specially
designed software. The objectives of the practical training are given below.
- To equip students of engineering and technology with effective speaking and
listening skills in English
- To help them develop their soft skills and people skills, which will make the
transition from college to workplace smoother and help them to excel in their jobs
- To enhance students' performance at Placement interviews, Group Discussions and
other recruitment exercises.
The lab practice is divided into two categories as "English Language Lab"
where the listening comprehension, reading comprehension and vocabulary and
speaking tests are conducted, and "Career Lab" where writing tests on Resume/Report
preparation and Letter writing are conducted. Also the students are given training in
presentation, Group Discussion and interview skills.
Forty per cent of the total marks (100) in final examinations is given for the
English Language Lab practice and the rest of 60% is given for the Career Lab
Practice, for which the test and evaluation are decided by the examiners during final
examinations.
Conclusion
In our country, as already said 75% of the students are from rural areas and they are
coming through regional language medium schools. Hence, based on their
background, we have to design the syllabus and adopt methods to test their English
language proficiency. Therefore, it is necessary to go for a detailed discussion as to
whether the existing curriculum is fulfilling the need of the hour and suitable to the
students in achieving their goals, the present methods for testing the proficiency of
the students are suitable and opinion and suggestions from the teaching faculties of
the English language in technical institutions are to be obtained.
===================
POST-MODERNISM
The term postmodern literature is used to describe certain characteristics of post–World War II literature (relying heavily, for example, on fragmentation, paradox, questionable narrators, etc.) and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature.
Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is hard to define and there is little agreement on the exact characteristics, scope, and importance of postmodern literature. But as is often the case with artistic movements, postmodern literature is commonly defined in relation to its precursor. More specifically, postmodern literature will not conclude with the neatly tied-up ending that is often found in modernist literature, but often parodies it. Postmodern authors tend to celebrate chance over craft, and further employ metafiction to undermine the writer's authority. Another characteristic of postmodern literature is the questioning of distinctions between high and low culture through the use of pastiche, the combination of subjects and genres not previously deemed fit for literature.
Notable influences
Postmodernist writers often point to early novels and story collections as inspiration for their experiments with narrative and structure: Don Quixote, 1001 Nights, The Decameron, and Candide, among many others. In the English language, Laurence Sterne's 1759 novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, with its heavy emphasis on parody and narrative experimentation, is often cited as an early influence on postmodernism. There were many 19th century examples of attacks on Enlightenment concepts, parody, and playfulness in literature, including Lord Byron's satire, especially Don Juan; Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus; Alfred Jarry's ribald Ubu parodies and his invention of 'Pataphysics; Lewis Carroll's playful experiments with signification; the work of Isidore Ducasse, Arthur Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde. Playwrights who worked in the late 19th and early 20th century whose thought and work would serve as an influence on the aesthetic of postmodernism include Swedish dramatist August Strindberg, the Italian author Luigi Pirandello, and the German playwright and theorist Bertolt Brecht. In the 1910s, artists associated with Dadaism celebrated chance, parody, playfulness, and challenged the authority of the artist.[clarification needed]Tristan Tzara claimed in "How to Make a Dadaist Poem" that to create a Dadaist poem one had only to put random words in a hat and pull them out one by one. Another way Dadaism influenced postmodern literature was in the development of collage, specifically collages using elements from advertisement or illustrations from popular novels (the collages of Max Ernst, for example). Artists associated with Surrealism, which developed from Dadaism, continued experimentations with chance and parody while celebrating the flow of the subconscious mind. André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, suggested that automatism and the description of dreams should play a greater role in the creation of literature. He used automatism to create his novel Nadja and used photographs to replace description as a parody of the overly-descriptive novelists he often criticized. Surrealist René Magritte's experiments with signification are used as examples by Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Foucault also uses examples from Jorge Luis Borges, an important direct influence on many postmodernist fiction writers. He is occasionally listed as a postmodernist, although he started writing in the 1920s. The influence of his experiments with metafiction and magic realism was not fully realized in the Anglo-American world until the postmodern period.[1]
Comparisons with modernist literature
Both modern and postmodern literature represent a break from 19th century realism. In character development, both modern and postmodern literature explore subjectivism, turning from external reality to examine inner states of consciousness, in many cases drawing on modernist examples in the "stream of consciousness" styles of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, or explorative poems like The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. In addition, both modern and postmodern literature explore fragmentariness in narrative- and character-construction. The Waste Land is often cited as a means of distinguishing modern and postmodern literature. The poem is fragmentary and employs pastiche like much postmodern literature, but the speaker in The Waste Land says, "these fragments I have shored against my ruins". Modernist literature sees fragmentation and extreme subjectivity as an existential crisis, or Freudian internal conflict, a problem that must be solved, and the artist is often cited as the one to solve it. Postmodernists, however, often demonstrate that this chaos is insurmountable; the artist is impotent, and the only recourse against "ruin" is to play within the chaos. Playfulness is present in many modernist works (Joyce's Finnegans Wake or Virginia Woolf'sOrlando, for example) and they may seem very similar to postmodern works, but with postmodernism playfulness becomes central and the actual achievement of order and meaning becomes unlikely.[1]
Shift to postmodernism
As with all stylistic eras, no definite dates exist for the rise and fall of postmodernism's popularity. 1941, the year in which Irish novelist James Joyce and English novelist Virginia Woolf both died, is sometimes used as a rough boundary for postmodernism's start.
The prefix "post", however, does not necessarily imply a new era. Rather, it could also indicate a reaction against modernism in the wake of the Second World War (with its disrespect for human rights, just confirmed in the Geneva Convention, through the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Holocaust, the bombing of Dresden, the fire-bombing of Tokyo, and Japanese American internment). It could also imply a reaction to significant post-war events: the beginning of the Cold War, the civil rights movement in the United States, postcolonialism (Postcolonial literature), and the rise of the personal computer(Cyberpunk fiction and Hypertext fiction).[2][3][4]
Some further argue that the beginning of postmodern literature could be marked by significant publications or literary events. For example, some mark the beginning of postmodernism with the first publication ofJohn Hawkes' The Cannibal in 1949, the first performance of Waiting for Godot in 1953, the first publication of Howl in 1956 or of Naked Lunch in 1959. For others the beginning is marked by moments in critical theory: Jacques Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play" lecture in 1966 or as late as Ihab Hassan's usage in The Dismemberment of Orpheus in 1971. Brian McHale details his main thesis on this shift, although many postmodern works have developed out of modernism, modernism is characterised by an epistemological dominant while postmodernism works are primarily concerned with questions of ontology.[5]
====================
PRINCIPLES OF LITERARY CRITICISM
POETICS
-Aristotle
Aristotle's Poetics (Greek: Περὶ ποιητικῆς, c. 335 BCE[1]) is the earliest-surviving work of dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory.[2] In it, Aristotle offers an account of what he calls "poetry" (a term which in Greek literally means "making" and in this context includes drama—comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play—as well aslyric poetry, epic poetry, and the dithyramb). He examines its "first principles" and identifies its genres and basic elements. His analysis of tragedy constitutes the core of the discussion.[3] Although Aristotle's Poetics is universally acknowledged in the Western critical tradition, Marvin Carlson explains, "almost every detail about his seminal work has aroused divergent opinions."[4]
The work was lost to the Western world and often misrepresented for a long time. It was available through the Middle Ages and early Renaissance only through a Latin translation of an Arabic version written by Averroes.
Core Terms:
Content
Aristotle's work on aesthetics consists of the Poetics and Rhetoric. The Poetics is specifically concerned with drama. At some point, Aristotle's original work was divided in two, each "book" written on a separate roll of papyrus.[6] Only the first part–that which focuses on tragedy–survives. The lost second part addressed comedy.[6] Scholars speculate that the Tractatus coislinianus summarises the contents of the lost second book.[7]
§ Matter
language, rhythm, and melody, for Aristotle, make up the matter of poetic creation. Where the epic poem makes use of language alone, the playing of the lyre involves rhythm and melody. Some poetic forms include a blending of all materials; for example, Greek tragic drama included a singing chorus, and so music and language were all part of the performance.
§ Subjects
Also "agents" in some translations. Aristotle differentiates between tragedy and comedy throughout the work by distinguishing between the nature of the human characters that populate either form. Aristotle finds that tragedy treats of serious, important, and virtuous people. Comedy, on the other hand, treats of people who are less virtuous, who are unimportant, undignified, laughable.[citation needed] Aristotle introduces here the influential tripartite division of characters in superior (βελτίονας) to the audience, inferior (χείρονας), or at the same level (τοιούτους).[8][9][10]
§ Method
One may imitate the agents through use of a narrator throughout, or only occasionally (using direct speech in parts and a narrator in parts, as Homer does), or only through direct speech (without a narrator), using actors to speak the lines directly. This latter is the method of tragedy (and comedy): without use of any narrator.
Having examined briefly the field of "poetry" in general, Aristotle proceeds to his definition of tragedy:
Tragedy is a representation of a serious, complete action which has magnitude, in embellished speech, with each of its elements [used] separately in the [various] parts [of the play] and [represented] by people acting and not by narration, accomplishing by means of pity and terror the catharsis of such emotions.
By "embellished speech", I mean that which has rhythm and melody, i.e. song. By "with its elements separately", I mean that some [parts of it] are accomplished only by means of spoken verses, and others again by means of song (1449b25-30).[11]
Tragedy consists of six parts which Aristotle enumerates in order of importance, beginning with the most essential and ending with the least:
Refers to the "structure of incidents" (actions). Key elements of the plot are reversals, recognitions, and suffering. The best plot should be "complex" (i.e. involve a change of fortune). It should imitate actions arousing fear and pity. Thus it should proceed from good fortune to bad and involve a high degree of suffering for the protagonist, usually involving physical harm or death.
Actions should be logical and follow naturally from actions that precede them. They will be more satisfying to the audience if they come about by surprise or seeming coincidence and are only afterward seen as plausible, even necessary.
When a character is unfortunate by reversal(s) of fortune (peripeteia), at first he suffers (pathos) and then he can realize (anagnorisis) the cause of his misery or a way to be released from the misery.
It is much better if a tragical accident happens to a hero because of a mistake he makes (hamartia) instead of things which might happen anyway. That is because the audience is more likely to be "moved" by it. A hero may have made it knowingly (in Medea) or unknowingly (Oedipus). A hero may leave a deed undone (due to timely discovery, knowledge present at the point of doing deed ...).
Main character should be
§ good - Aristotle explains that audiences do not like, for example, villains "making fortune from misery" in the end. It might happen though, and might make the play interesting. Nevertheless, the moral is at stake here and morals are important to make people happy (people can, for example, see tragedy because they want to release their anger)
§ appropriate–if a character is supposed to be wise, it is unlikely he is young (supposing wisdom is gained with age)
§ consistent–if a person is a soldier, he is unlikely to be scared of blood (if this soldier is scared of blood it must be explained and play some role in the story to avoid confusing the audience); it is also "good" if a character doesn't change opinion "that much" if the play is not "driven" by who characters are, but by what they do (audience is confused in case of unexpected shifts in behaviour [and its reasons, morals ...] of characters)
§ "consistently inconsistent"–if a character always behaves foolishly it is strange if he suddenly becomes smart. In this case it would be good to explain such change, otherwise the audience may be confused. If character changes opinion a lot it should be clear he is a character who has this trait, not a real life person - this is also to avoid confusion
§ thought (dianoia)–spoken (usually) reasoning of human characters can explain the characters or story background ...
Refers to the quality of speech in tragedy. Speeches should reflect character, the moral qualities of those on the stage.
The Chorus too should be regarded as one of the actors. It should be an integral part of the whole, and share in the action
Refers to the visual apparatus of the play, including set, costumes and props. Aristotle calls spectacle the "least artistic" element of tragedy, and the "least connected with the work of the poet (playwright). For example: if the play has "beautiful" costumes and "bad" acting and "bad" story, there is "something wrong" with it. Even though that "beauty" may save the play it is "not a nice thing".
He offers the earliest-surviving explanation for the origins of tragedy and comedy:
Anyway, arising from an improvisatory beginning (both tragedy and comedy—tragedy from the leaders of the dithyramb, and comedy from the leaders of the phallic processions which even now continue as a custom in many of our cities) [...] (1449a10-13)[12]
Influence
Poetics is considered to have been less influential in its time compared with what is generally understood to be its more famous contemporary, Rhetoric. This is probably because in Aristotle's time rhetoric and poetics were classified as sort of siblings in the pantheon of ideal things. Because of rhetoric's direct importance for law and politics, it evolved to become, to a large degree, distinct from poetics, in spite of both themas being classified under aesthetics in the Aristotelian system of metaphysics. In this sense, rhetoric and poetics are two sides of the same thing—the aesthetic dimension. In Aristotelian philosophy, this is regarded as one of the metaphysical aspects of things; in the Kantian view of the pure aesthetic, it is understood as something non-conceptual that frees the mind.
The Arabic version of Aristotle’s Poetics that influenced the Middle Ages was translated from a Greek manuscript dated to sometime prior to the year 700. This manuscript was translated from Greek to Syriac and is independent of the currently-accepted 11th-century source designated Paris 1741. The Syriac language source used for the Arabic translations departed widely in vocabulary from the original Poetics and it initiated a misinterpretation of Aristotelian thought that continued through the Middle Ages.[13]
There are two different Arabic interpretations of Aristotle’s Poetics in commentaries by Abu Nasr al-Farabi and Averroes (i.e., Abu al-Walid Ibn Rushd).
Al-Farabi’s treatise endeavors to establish poetry as a logical faculty of expression, giving it validity in the Islamic world. Averroes’ commentary attempts to harmonize his assessment of the Poetics with al-Farabi’s, but he is ultimately unable to reconcile his ascription of moral purpose to poetry with al-Farabi’s logical interpretation.
Averroes' interpretation of the Poetics was accepted by the West because of its relevance to their humanistic viewpoints. Occasionally the philosophers of the Middle Ages even preferred Averroes’ commentary to Aristotle's stated sense. This resulted in the survival of Aristotle’s Poetics through the Arabic literary tradition.
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BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA
-Coleridge
This essay is the adaptation from Shelling's ideas expressed in his 'System of Transcendental Idealism'. It is connected with his famous definition of imagination and fancy. He defines imagination, divides it in to two and creates distinction between fancy and imagination. Fancy is a mechanical process, which receives the elementary images and without altering the parts reassembles them in to a different spatial and temporal order. Fancy creates humorous kind of poetry. It follows the laws and association and is related to memory. But imagination is a creative force that dissolves, diffuses and dissipates the things in order to recreate. Imagination, thus, produces higher, more serious and more passionate poetry.
Imagination is divided as primary and secondary. Primary imagination enables mind to see unity, it is unconscious act or part of mind. Secondary imagination is more active, more conscious and is a deeper human consciousness. Everybody possesses primary imagination. It brings infinite things to finite and order in chaos. Primary imagination also has organic power that provides raw materials to secondary imagination. However, it does not produce completely new thing. It is like physical change like that of changing of water in to ice. But secondary imagination is like chemical change that creates completely new things. Such imagination is only with poets and creative artists. It is poetic faculty that harmonizes jumbled experience or raw materials provided by primary imagination. The poetry is the poetic genius, which suspends and modifies images and thoughts and the art is beautiful produced buy secondary imagination. The objects and ideas that are raw in primary imagination get maturity with the functioning of secondary imagination. We see newness in the things; beyond what they appear. All human being posses these two qualities but distinction lies in expression. So, everyone can't be a poet or philosopher.
Coleridge explains that a poem cannot be a poem by only the proper arrangement of alliteration, rhyme and meter. Poem is distinguished from prose because prose and drama lack organic whole, rhyme and meter. A poem should impart immediate pleasure and moral purpose. Pleasure is the inherent quality of a poem. Poem also differs from poetry. Poem is the physical manifestation, mechanical superficial and externalized form of poetry. But poetry is the psychological process of poet's mind; it is underlying structure and the outcome of poetic genius. To understand poetry is to understand the poet, who has poetic genius, which modifies certain images, thoughts and emotion. The poet can see the universal soul or divinity such process is called poetry. Whatever the secondary imagination does inside the poet's mind, it is a poetic process and is called poetry.
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AN ESSAY OF DRAMATIC POESY
-John Dryden
John Dryden’s present essay “An essay on Dramatic Poesy” gives an explicit account of neo – classical theory of art in general. He defends the classical drama standing on the line of Aristotle saying it is an imitation of life, and reflects human nature clearly.He also discusses the three unities, rules that require a play take place in one place, during one day, and that it develops one single action or plot.
The essay is written in the form of dialogue concerned to four gentlemen: Eugenius, Crites, Lisideius and Neander. Neander seems to speak for Dryden himself.Eugenius takes the side of the modern English dramatists by criticizing the faults of the classical playwright, who did not themselves observe the unity of place. But Crites defended the ancient and pointed out that they invited the principles of dramatic art enunciated by Aristotle and Horace. Crites opposed to rhyme in plays and argues that through the moderns excel in science; the ancient age was the true age of poetry. Lesideius defends the French playwrights and attacks the English tendency to mix genres. He defines a play as a just and lively image of human and the change of fortune to which it is subject for the delight and instruction of mankind.
Neander favours the moderns, respects the ancients, critical to rigid rules of dramas and he favours rhyme if it is in proper place like in grand subject matter.Neander a spokesperson of Dryden argues that tragic comedy is the best form for a play; because it is the closest to life in which emotions are heightened by both mirth and sadness.He also finds subplots as an integral part to enrich a play. He finds the French drama, with its single action. Neander favors the violation of the unities because it leads to the variety to the English plays. The unities have a narrowing and crumpling effect on the French plays, which are often betrayed in to absurdities from which the English plays are free. The violation of unities helps the English play Wright to present a mere, just and lively image of human nature. In his comparison of French and English drama, Neander characterizes the best proofs of the Elizabethan playwrights. He praises Shakespeare ancients and moderns.Neander comes to the end for the superiority of the Elizabethans with a close examination of a play by Johnson which Neander believes a perfect demonstration that the English were capable of following classical rules. In this way, Dryden’s commitment to the neoclassical tradition is displayed. Dryden rebukes against the critics, who attack the use of rhyme both in tragedy and comedy. Since nobody speaks in rhyme in real life, he supports the use of blank verse in drama and says that the use of rhyme is serious plays is justifiable than the blank verse.
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LETTERS
-John Keats
Last Poet of a Romantic period, John Keats' critical speculation is found in his letters, which he wrote to different persons in different walks of life. He believes in sensation rather than thought. Later he is also known as sensuous poet. He is sensuous poet because he makes use of that poetic image, which directly affects sense organs. Keats finds truth and beauty as two aspects, which are inseparable. Beauty for him is the source of knowledge, which is beyond the reach of consecutive reasoning. By consecutive reasoning we mean the use of reason in a successive way without caring anything for other till knowledge is accomplished.
He associates life of sensation with empathic experience and says" If a sparrow comes before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel". Like Kant and Coleridge he distinguishes beautiful and agreeable or disagreeable. For him, the excellence of art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporation like in King Lear by Shakespeare. Keats' most important concern is his concept of negative capability. By negative capability Keats mean the capacity to remain in uncertainty without any struggle to reach domain of certainty and rationality. By negative capability, we furthermore mean the capacity to see death in life and life in death, pleasure in pain, pain in pleasure, beauty in ugliness and ugliness in beauty, art of life and life of art, time in eternity and eternity in time.
Additionally negative capability is that capability which creates a state in which the observer and the observed are one. The dichotomy between the subject and the object are collapse and both merge in to one. He states that poet's must able to maintain the aesthetic distance between his/her personality and the personality of the characters. In other words, negative of poet's personality is what he calls Negative capability. Actually speaking, his concept of Negative capability involves self- annihilation or disinterestedness. Keats discovers that to comprehend experience and to attain freedom from its bondage what is necessary is self- annihilation. It requires that an essential quality of a great poet is his immense capacity for sympathetic identification with some object that he considers dearer to himself. Keats believes that Wordsworth and Coleridge did not possess negative capability. Wordsworth could not annihilate the self or more precisely, the ego, for the yawning ego hinders disinterested perception and action, and leads to involvement to experience. As for Coleridge, he would let go by a fire-isolated verisimilitude caught from the penetration of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half- knowledge power change.
Keats believed that Shakespeare exemplified, to a remarkable degree, the power of self- absorption as well as wonderful sympathy and identification with variety of experience. For Keats, the necessary precondition of poetry is submission to things as they are, without trying to intellectualize them in to something else.
Keats offers a new concept of aesthetic revolution, and brings to bear upon in the rigor of abstract thinking and the sensitivity of perception. T.S Eliot's concept of objective Correlative and The Dissociation of sensibility have this precision and rigors but Keats Negative capability lacks it.
It is his speculative query rather than philosophical concept Keats has tried to create the insight in to creative psychology, which conditions the characters of a work of art. For him, Shakespeare is able to dramatize a diversity of attitude and temperaments, and his imaginative flexibility is such that in a great play like Hamlet or King Lear in which the protagonist seem to have remarkable autonym. Keats notion of negative capability undermines the complex but firm control exerted by Shakespeare. However, for Keats this concept is a new mode in Romantic critical attitude when the poets’ personality plays significant role.
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THE FOUR KINDS OF MEANING
-I.A.Richards
Richards shows an interest in the effect of poems on the reader. He tends to locate poem in reders response. The being of the poem seems to exist only in the readers. Poetry is a form of words that organizes our attitudes. Poetry is composed of pseudo statements, therefore it is effective. He talks about the close analysis of a text. Like a new critics, he values irony. He praises the irony and says that it is characteristics of poetry of higher order. In “The Forth Kinds of Meaning”, he talks about functions of language. Basically he points out four types of functions or meaning that the language has to perform.
Sense
What speaker or author speaks is sense. The thing that the writer literally conveys is sense. Here, the speaker speaks to arouse the readers thought. The language is very straightforward which is descriptive. This language is not poetic. Words are used to direct the hearer's attraction up on some state of affairs or to excite them. Sense is whatness of language use.
Feeling
Feeling is writer’s emotional attitude towards the subject. It means writer’s attachment or detachment to the subject is feeling. It is an expression. The speaker or writer uses language to express his views. This very language is emotive, poetic and literary also. Here only, rhyme and meter cannot make poetry to be a good, emotion is equally important. Especially in lyric poem, emotion plays vital role.
Tone
Tone refers to attitude of speaker towards his listener. There is a kind of relation between speaker and listener. Since speaker is aware of his relationship with language and with the listener, he changes the level of words as the level of audience changes. It means tone varies from listener to listener.
Intention
Intention is the purpose of speaker. Speaker has certain aim to speak either it is consciously or unctuously. Listener has to understand the speaker's purpose to understand his meaning. If the audience can't understand his purpose the speaker becomes unsuccessful. The intention of author can be found in dramatic and semi- dramatic literature.
There four types of meaning in totality constitute the total meaning of any text. Therefore all utterances can be looked at from four points of view, revealing four kinds of meaning are not easily separated. But they are in dispensable terms for explaining. Basically, the four meaning are interconnected in poetry.
There four types of meaning in totality constitute the total meaning of any text. Therefore all utterances can be looked at from four points of view, revealing four kinds of meaning are not easily separated. But they are in dispensable terms for explaining. Basically, the four meaning are interconnected in poetry.
Doctrine in Poetry
Here Richarads talks about the proper way of analyzing the text and what critic and reader should be like. He tends to locate the poem in readers response to it. It means readers analyze the text and respond any poetry from similar judgmental aspects. It shows every reader produces same meaning from same text as the text is organic whole obstacles and barriers the variation of meaning occurs.
His ideas are oriented toward distinguishing the belief of readers from that of the poets. If there occurs contradiction between the belief of readers and the belief of poets, the readers do not get sole meaning from the text. Because of readers’ temperament and personal experience, they don't get same meaning from the text The obstacle that brings variation in meaning is doctrinal belief of readers.
Here Richarads talks about the proper way of analyzing the text and what critic and reader should be like. He tends to locate the poem in readers response to it. It means readers analyze the text and respond any poetry from similar judgmental aspects. It shows every reader produces same meaning from same text as the text is organic whole obstacles and barriers the variation of meaning occurs.
His ideas are oriented toward distinguishing the belief of readers from that of the poets. If there occurs contradiction between the belief of readers and the belief of poets, the readers do not get sole meaning from the text. Because of readers’ temperament and personal experience, they don't get same meaning from the text The obstacle that brings variation in meaning is doctrinal belief of readers.
Richards finds two kinds of belief and disbelief
i) Intellectual belief
ii) Emotional belief
In an intellectual belief we weigh an idea based on doctrinal preoccupation, where as an emotional belief is related to the state of mind. He thinks that the good kind of being comes from the blending of the both. Until and unless we are free from beliefs and disbeliefs there comes variation in meaning. But to free our mind from all impurities is not possible. Therefore the reader should be sincere to get single meaning escaping from such obstacles. This sincerity is the way to success. The sincere reader has perfect and genuine mind. To be genuine mind, one should be free from impurities. In this sense the reader should be free from obstruction these obstacles is not possible.
i) Intellectual belief
ii) Emotional belief
In an intellectual belief we weigh an idea based on doctrinal preoccupation, where as an emotional belief is related to the state of mind. He thinks that the good kind of being comes from the blending of the both. Until and unless we are free from beliefs and disbeliefs there comes variation in meaning. But to free our mind from all impurities is not possible. Therefore the reader should be sincere to get single meaning escaping from such obstacles. This sincerity is the way to success. The sincere reader has perfect and genuine mind. To be genuine mind, one should be free from impurities. In this sense the reader should be free from obstruction these obstacles is not possible.
THE METAPHYSICAL POETS
-T.S.Eliot
T.S.Eliot’s essay The Metaphysical Poets’ was first published as a review of J.G. Grierson’s edition of Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the 17th Century. But the essay is much more than a mere review; it is a critical document of much value and significance. It is one of the most significant critical documents of the modern age. It has brought about a revaluation and reassessment of interest in these poets who had been neglected for a considerable time. Eliot has thrown new light on the metaphysical poets, and shown that they are neither quaint nor fantastic, but great and mature poets. They do not represent a digression from the mainstream of English poetry, but rather a continuation of it.
It is in this essay that Eliot has used, for the first time, the phrases ‘Dissociation of Sensibility’ and ‘Unification of Sensibility’, phrases which have acquired world-wide currency and which, ever since, have had a far reaching impact on literary criticism.
Eliot examines one by one with suitable illustrations the characteristics which are generally considered ‘metaphysical’. First, there is the elaboration of a simile to the farthest possible extent, to be met with frequently in the poetry of Donne and Cowley. Secondly, there is the device of the development of an image by rapid association of thought requiring considerable agility on the part of the reader that is a technique of compression. Thirdly, the Metaphysicals produce their effects by sudden contrasts. Thus in the line, “A bracelet of bright hair about the bone”, the most powerful effect is produced by sudden contrast of the associations of ‘bright hair’ and ‘bone’. But such telescoping of images and contrasts of associations are not a characteristic of the poetry of Donne one. It also characterizes Elizabethan dramatists like Shakespeare, Webster, Tourneour and Middleton. This suggests that Done, Cowley and others belong to the Elizabethan tradition and not to any school. The dominant characteristics of Donne’s poetry are also the characteristics of the great Elizabethans.
Eliot then takes up Dr. Johnson’s famous definition of Metaphysical Poetry, in which the great doctor has tried to define this poetry by its faults. Dr. Johnson in his Life of Cowley points that in Metaphysical Poetry “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” But Eliot says that to bring together heterogeneous ideas and compelling them into unity by the operation of the poet’s mind is universal in poetry. Such unity is present even in the poetry of Johnson himself, The Vanity of Humah Wishes. The force of Dr. Johnson’s remark lies in the fact that in his view the Metaphysical poets could only ‘yoke’ by violence dissimilar ideas. They could not unite them of fuse them into a single whole, however this is not a fact. A number of poets of this school have eminently succeeded in uniting heterogeneous ideas. Eliot quotes from Herbert, Cowley, Bishop King and other poets in supports of his contention. Therefore, he concludes that Metaphysical poetry cannot be differentiated from other poetry by Dr. Johnson’s definition. The fault, which Dr. Johnson points out, is not there, and the unity of heterogeneous ideas is common to all poetry.
Eliot shows that Done and the other poets of the 17th century, “were the direct and normal development of the precedent age”, and that their characteristic virtue was something valuable which subsequently disappeared. Dr. Johnson has rightly pointed out that these poets were ‘analytic’; they were devoted to too much analysis and dissection of particular emotional situations. But Dr. Johnson has failed to see that they could also unite into new wholes the concepts they had analyzed. Eliot shows that their special virtue was the fusion of heterogeneous material into a new unity after dissociation. In other words, metaphysical poetry is distinguished from other poetry by unification of sensibility, and subsequently, ‘dissociation of sensibility’ overtook English poetry, and this was unfortunate.
The great Elizabethans and early Jacobians had a developed unified sensibility which is expressed in their poetry. By ‘sensibility’ Eliot does not merely mean feeling or the capacity to receive sense impressions. He means much more than that. By ‘sensibility’ he means a synthetic faculty, a faculty which can amalgamate and unite thought and feeling, which can fuse into a single whole the varied and disparate, often opposite and contradictory, experiences. The Elizabethans had such a sensibility. They were widely read, they thought on what they read, and their thinking and learning modified their mode of feeling. Eliot gives concrete illustration to show that such unification of sensibility, such fusion of thought and feeling, is to be found in the poetry of Done and other Metaphysical poets, but it is lacking in the poetry of Tennyson, Browning and the Romantic Poets.
After Donne and Herbert, a change came over English poetry. The poets lost the capacity of uniting thought and feeling. The ‘unification of sensibility’ was lost, and ‘dissociation of sensibility’ set in. After that the poets can either think or they can feel; there are either intellectual poets who can only think, or there are poets who can only feel. The poets of the 18th century were intellectuals, they thought but did not feel; the romantics of the 19th century felt but did not think. Tennyson and Browning can merely reflect or ruminate, i.e. meditate poetically on their experience, but cannot express it poetically. Eliot says, “Tennyson and Browning are poets and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, and fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.” In other words, the metaphysical poets had a unified sensibility which enabled them to assimilate and fuse into a new wholes most disparate and heterogeneous experiences. They could feel their thoughts as intensely as the odour of a rose, that is to say they could express their thoughts through sensuous imagery. In his poems, Donne expresses his thoughts and ideas by embodying them in sensuous imagery and it is mainly through the imagery that the unification of sensibility finds its appropriate expression.
=============
Seven Types of Ambiguity
Empson is the first analytic critic to apply the principles of I.A. Richards on the nature and function of language consistently and with gusto to particular passages of poetry. The objections raised in his Seven Types of Ambiguity are still valid. James Smith points out that Empson’s analyses are interesting only as revelation of the poet’s or Empson’s ingenious mind. He complains about the vague nature of ambiguity. While it is possible to show that Empson’s method often leads to critical irresponsibility as pointed out by Elder Olson in his ‘William Empson, Contemporary Criticism and Poetic Diction’, Empson is one of the sharpest and the most sensitive of modern critics.
Seven Types of Ambiguity presents the different kinds of ambiguity or ‘types of logical disorder in the order of increasing distance from simple statement and logical exposition. In the essay, ‘The Seventh Type of Ambiguity’, Empson takes up the seventh type of ambiguity which, to him, is ‘the most ambiguous that can be conceived’. It ‘occurs when the two meanings of the word, the two values of the ambiguity are the two opposite meanings defined by the context so that the total effect is to show a fundamental division in the writer’s mind’.
Empson provides Hopkins’s The Windhover as an example of poetry to convey an indecision and reverberation in the mind. Though I.A. Richards has excellently written about it, Empson’s analysis adds to his. Hopkins became a Jesuit and burnt his early poems on entering the order. There may be some reference to this sacrifice in the line : ‘Buckle! AND the fire that that breaks from thee then’.
According to Empson, Hopkins conceives the active physical beauty of the bird as the opposite of his patient spiritual renunciation. The statements of the poem appear to insist that his own life is superior, but he cannot decisively judge between them; he holds both with agony in his mind. The phrase ‘My heart in hiding’ implies that the life of the windhover is more dangerous than the life of renunciation which is the more lovely as evidenced in the last three lines of the poem.
The word ‘Buckle’ admits of two tenses and two meanings: ‘they do buckle here’, or ‘come, and buckle yourself here, ‘buckle’ like a military belt, for the discipline of heroic action and ‘buckle’ like a bicycle wheel, ‘make useless, distorted and incapable of its natural motion. The word, ‘here’ in the line : ‘Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here’ may mean ‘in the case of the bird’, or ‘in the case of the Jesuit’; the word, ‘then’ in the next line means ‘when you have become like the bird’ or ‘when you have become like the Jesuit’. ‘Chevalier’ in the third line of the sestet personifies either physical or spiritual activity; Christ riding to Jerusalem or the cavalry men ready for the charge; Pegasus or the windhover. Thus in the first three lines of the sestet, Empson says, we have a clear case of the Freudian use of opposites – where two things that are incompatible are spoken of simultaneously by words applying to both. The last three lines of the sestet convey the conflict more strongly and more beautifully.
After analyzing Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’, Empson interprets George Herbert’s The Sacrifice as a poem having conflicts though the business of this doctrinal poem is to state a generalised solution of them. The speaker in this poem is Jesus Christ. As interpreted by Empson, the speaker is speaking with pathetic simplicity, an innocent surprise that people should treat him so, and a complete failure to understand the case against him:
They did accuse me of great villainy
That I did thrust into the Deitie;
Who never thought that cry robberie;
Was ever grief like mine?
The word ‘rased’ applies to the two opposite operations. Moreover, the refrain (a quotation from Jeremiah) refers to the wicked city of Jerusalem, abandoned by God for her sins and not to the Saviour. There is a fusion of love of Christ and the vindictive terrors of the sacrificial idea in his advice to his deal friends not to weep for him, for, because he has wept for both, they will need their for themselves. (In his agony, they abandoned him):
Weep not dear friends, since I for both have wept
When all my tears were blood, the while you slept
Your tears for your own fortunes should be kept
Was ever grief like mine?
The stress of the main meaning is on the loving – kindness of Jesus. But the last verse contains as strong and simple a double meaning. As per the evaluation of Empson, in this verse, Christ may wish that his own grief may never be exceeded among the humanity he pities; he may incidentally wish that he may be sure of recognition and of a church that will be a sounding board to his agony. Empson gives this double meaning as just a possibility though it may sound blasphemous. A memory of the revengeful power of Jehova gives resonance to the voice of the merciful power of Jesus:
‘Herod in judgement sits, while I do stand
Examines me with a censorious hand’.
‘me’ is made to ring out with a triumphant and scornful arrogance. It implies that he will be far more furious in his judgement than his judges.
Empson quotes a few more stanzas from George Herbert’s doctrinal poem and brings out the conflicts and contradictions in the poem. He quotes specific examples from the poem to prove that the supreme act of sin is combined with the supreme act of virtue in the person of Christ. The final contradiction presented is found in the lines :
‘Lo here I hand, charged with a world of sin
The greater world of the two . . .
as the complete Christ; scapegoat and tragic hero;
loved because hated; hated because god like;
freeing from torture because tortured;
and torturing because merciful.
Seven Types of Ambiguity presents the different kinds of ambiguity or ‘types of logical disorder in the order of increasing distance from simple statement and logical exposition. In the essay, ‘The Seventh Type of Ambiguity’, Empson takes up the seventh type of ambiguity which, to him, is ‘the most ambiguous that can be conceived’. It ‘occurs when the two meanings of the word, the two values of the ambiguity are the two opposite meanings defined by the context so that the total effect is to show a fundamental division in the writer’s mind’.
Empson provides Hopkins’s The Windhover as an example of poetry to convey an indecision and reverberation in the mind. Though I.A. Richards has excellently written about it, Empson’s analysis adds to his. Hopkins became a Jesuit and burnt his early poems on entering the order. There may be some reference to this sacrifice in the line : ‘Buckle! AND the fire that that breaks from thee then’.
According to Empson, Hopkins conceives the active physical beauty of the bird as the opposite of his patient spiritual renunciation. The statements of the poem appear to insist that his own life is superior, but he cannot decisively judge between them; he holds both with agony in his mind. The phrase ‘My heart in hiding’ implies that the life of the windhover is more dangerous than the life of renunciation which is the more lovely as evidenced in the last three lines of the poem.
The word ‘Buckle’ admits of two tenses and two meanings: ‘they do buckle here’, or ‘come, and buckle yourself here, ‘buckle’ like a military belt, for the discipline of heroic action and ‘buckle’ like a bicycle wheel, ‘make useless, distorted and incapable of its natural motion. The word, ‘here’ in the line : ‘Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here’ may mean ‘in the case of the bird’, or ‘in the case of the Jesuit’; the word, ‘then’ in the next line means ‘when you have become like the bird’ or ‘when you have become like the Jesuit’. ‘Chevalier’ in the third line of the sestet personifies either physical or spiritual activity; Christ riding to Jerusalem or the cavalry men ready for the charge; Pegasus or the windhover. Thus in the first three lines of the sestet, Empson says, we have a clear case of the Freudian use of opposites – where two things that are incompatible are spoken of simultaneously by words applying to both. The last three lines of the sestet convey the conflict more strongly and more beautifully.
After analyzing Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’, Empson interprets George Herbert’s The Sacrifice as a poem having conflicts though the business of this doctrinal poem is to state a generalised solution of them. The speaker in this poem is Jesus Christ. As interpreted by Empson, the speaker is speaking with pathetic simplicity, an innocent surprise that people should treat him so, and a complete failure to understand the case against him:
They did accuse me of great villainy
That I did thrust into the Deitie;
Who never thought that cry robberie;
Was ever grief like mine?
The word ‘rased’ applies to the two opposite operations. Moreover, the refrain (a quotation from Jeremiah) refers to the wicked city of Jerusalem, abandoned by God for her sins and not to the Saviour. There is a fusion of love of Christ and the vindictive terrors of the sacrificial idea in his advice to his deal friends not to weep for him, for, because he has wept for both, they will need their for themselves. (In his agony, they abandoned him):
Weep not dear friends, since I for both have wept
When all my tears were blood, the while you slept
Your tears for your own fortunes should be kept
Was ever grief like mine?
The stress of the main meaning is on the loving – kindness of Jesus. But the last verse contains as strong and simple a double meaning. As per the evaluation of Empson, in this verse, Christ may wish that his own grief may never be exceeded among the humanity he pities; he may incidentally wish that he may be sure of recognition and of a church that will be a sounding board to his agony. Empson gives this double meaning as just a possibility though it may sound blasphemous. A memory of the revengeful power of Jehova gives resonance to the voice of the merciful power of Jesus:
‘Herod in judgement sits, while I do stand
Examines me with a censorious hand’.
‘me’ is made to ring out with a triumphant and scornful arrogance. It implies that he will be far more furious in his judgement than his judges.
Empson quotes a few more stanzas from George Herbert’s doctrinal poem and brings out the conflicts and contradictions in the poem. He quotes specific examples from the poem to prove that the supreme act of sin is combined with the supreme act of virtue in the person of Christ. The final contradiction presented is found in the lines :
‘Lo here I hand, charged with a world of sin
The greater world of the two . . .
as the complete Christ; scapegoat and tragic hero;
loved because hated; hated because god like;
freeing from torture because tortured;
and torturing because merciful.
==================
THE ARCHETYPES OF LITERATURE
-NORTHROP FRYE
Northrop Frye
Born in 1912 in Canada, died in 1991.
Educated at University of Toronto, Emmanuel College, and Merton College in Oxford.
His wrote 40, among which Anatomy of Criticism is one of his most important contributions.
Born in 1912 in Canada, died in 1991.
Educated at University of Toronto, Emmanuel College, and Merton College in Oxford.
His wrote 40, among which Anatomy of Criticism is one of his most important contributions.
Frye views literature as an ongoing conversation; writers respond to each other. Richter explains that for Frye: "Each generation rewrites the stories of the past in ways that make sense for it, recycling a vast tradition over the ages" (641).
In Anatomy of Criticism deals with
modes (myth, legend, mimetic, ironic)
symbols (literal, descriptive, formal)
myths (the quest as it relates to comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony)
genres (lyric, drama, epos, and fiction.
modes (myth, legend, mimetic, ironic)
symbols (literal, descriptive, formal)
myths (the quest as it relates to comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony)
genres (lyric, drama, epos, and fiction.
The Archetypes of Literature
Section I.
action art wisdom
history humanities philosophy
events criticism ideas
Section I.
action art wisdom
history humanities philosophy
events criticism ideas
art---->criticism; this should be a science
nature---->physics, etc.; this is a science
Criticism should have the appearance of a science; right now there is too much junk in literary analysis--to much opinion based on issues of taste rather than some organizing principle of evaluation.
We need principles to distinguish the significant from the meaningless; we need to keep the text/literature in the center.
We need principles to distinguish the significant from the meaningless; we need to keep the text/literature in the center.
We can't rely on value judgments that are casual--this is chitchat and pseudo criticism. We need a systematic approach and we need to consider the reader in a rhetorical sense, but we also have to undertake a structural analysis that assumes an overarching coherence.
Literary criticism can rely on patterns
Section II
A critic's role is to look for connection between the poet and the poem, but there are also unconscious influences and their are myths and symbols that have been inherited.
A critic's role is to look for connection between the poet and the poem, but there are also unconscious influences and their are myths and symbols that have been inherited.
Two ways to proceed: inductive and deductive
Inductive--look for patterns, make educated guesses
Deductve--look for consequences, look for coherence and try to categorize
Deductve--look for consequences, look for coherence and try to categorize
There are two ways of thinking about genre:
1) that there is a platonic, pre-existing form
Note: there are archetypes of genres as well as of images
1) that there is a platonic, pre-existing form
Note: there are archetypes of genres as well as of images
2) that the social conditions produced the work (Gothic, Baroque, etc.).
Literary criticism is the history of ideas; it moves from the analysis of the primitive to the analysis of the sophisticated
Literary criticism is the history of ideas; it moves from the analysis of the primitive to the analysis of the sophisticated
Perspective is gained by approaching the text closely and then backing up for perspective; this is induction.
Section III.
This section deals with deductive reasoning, the principle of recurrence
Examination of time and space, narrative and meaning
rhythm=narrative
pattern=meaning
This section deals with deductive reasoning, the principle of recurrence
Examination of time and space, narrative and meaning
rhythm=narrative
pattern=meaning
Myths:
dawn, spring
zenith, summer
sunset, autumn,
darkness, winter
dawn, spring
zenith, summer
sunset, autumn,
darkness, winter
Structural approach based on archetypes: flood, sea, etc.
Epiphanies give meaning to these archetypes and wed the dream world and the hero
Epiphanies give meaning to these archetypes and wed the dream world and the hero
Visions:
comic
tragic
comic
tragic
=================
IRONY AS A PRINCIPLE OF STRUCTURE
-CLEANTH BROOKS
In his landmark essay Irony as a Principle of Structure, Cleanth Brooks argues that meaning of universal significance is related through the ironies inherent in the structure of a poem. This emphasis on structure as a conduit for meaning is reflective of the importance placed on the structure of plot in Aristotelian mimesis. In the Poetics, a "treatise on the productive science"(39) of creating epic and dramatic tragedy, plot is the element of structure that creates a unity through which ideas of universal significance are expressed. Brooks and Aristotle each purport a unity of parts which creates either ironic tensions or plot, and thereby determine a poem�s value as a conduit for universals.
Brooks insists that poetry has an organic quality which produces ironies. He suggests poetry is like a plant, with a fixed and definite organization (roots, stalk, leaf), a structure which is complete and useful. A poem, like a plant, relies on all its component parts for life; there is a fundamental arrangement within a poetic creation which depends upon interrelationships. Words are the individual building blocks of a poem, and like the cells of a plant, each must be considered individually as structurally significant. Each word is understood according to the words which surround it. It is the relationship between each of these words which creates a context out of which meaning evolves. Brooks terms the relationship between the component parts of a poem the pressures of context: just as the cells of a plant rely on adjoining cells for water, nutrients and energy, so in poems, words rely on surrounding words for their meaning. It is the structural, organic unity of the parts which allows for the production of meaning, in this case through the pressures of context.The significance of words to the structure of poetry in Brooks� essay finds a counterpart in Aristotle�s Poetics in the importance of the elements of plot. In order to be significant, a work must "be whole", that is , it must "have a beginning, a middle and an end"(47). Thus, Aristotle divides plot into three constituent parts: beginning (something which must be first), middle (a transformation or change in fortune), and end (something which nothing else follows, a resolution). These parts are akin to the words in a poem in Brooks� theory in that they likewise display a unity. For example, the middle stage of the plot contains a reversal of fortune, preferably through reversal and/or recognition. The change of fortune should grow naturally from the action in the beginning of the poem. The meaning of the whole depends on the unambiguous placement of each of the constituents of plot and the organic relationship between those parts.
In Irony as a Principle of Structure, Brooks claims irony is produced by the pressures of context. These pressures define the relationship between the components of a poem (the words) and the production of meaning. Irony is a tension between multiple meanings of a word, meanings which are pressured by the presence of surrounding words and the situation in which they are said. Brooks compares poetry to drama in order to describe how pressures of context produce irony: "what is said is said in a particular situation and by a particular dramatic character"(758). Because there is always a speaker who narrates a poem, and setting for that narration, words will never exist in isolation, and must be considered in relation to, as affected by, their context. For Brooks, context forces ironies, which are the key to meaning. A successful poem "comes to terms with itself"; it does not ignore the tensions produced by context but rather acknowledges them, fusing the "irrelevant and discordant"(760). It is in these fusions that harmony exists; it is in the tensions that meaning exists.
Meaning evolves out of contextual pressures in both Brooks� New Criticism and Aristotelian mimesis. In the Poetics, the reversal and recognition which lead directly to a change in fortune in the plot "should occur through the plot itself and not by means of deus ex machina"(53), or something external to the plot as it has developed. Context, the relationship between the parts of the whole, pressures the action of plot to be a unity. The end (blossoms) of the action should grow naturally out of the beginning (roots) and middle (stalk). Integrating Brooks� plant metaphor seems appropriate, for Aristotelian mimesis, with its emphasis on unity, affirms the organic nature of poetry.
Aristotle describes the unity of the parts of the plot (beginning, middle and end) through the action of plot. Tragedy, according to a definition in the Poetics, "is an imitation of an action; and it is, on account of this, an imitation of men acting" (47). It is the acting which forms the cohesion of the elements of a plot; it imbues them with a lifelike quality�like life, yet not life because it is a creative imitation. Aristotle hints that the imitation of life is somehow superior to life itself, in as much as the imitation is unified and meaningful. To describe the poet�s job in creating an imitation, Aristotle claims "that it is no the function of the poet to narrate events that have actually happened, but rather, events such as they might occur according to the laws of probability and necessity"(48). In the course of any day, countless occurrences seem unrelated to the events which precede and follow them. There is no apparent causality in the narrative of an ordinary day: had a bad dream, awoke very hungry, ate a donut for breakfast, experienced slight nausea after breakfast, took the garbage to the curb, attended class, forgot to meet Dad for a lunch date. If connections exist, they are unclear. Aristotelian mimesis is superior in relating meaning because it is creative; that is, it entails selection of the events of plot in order to create meaning. So, to perform selective mimesis on the above example, the character has had dream, the content of which reflects upon a harsh judgement made by her father on the issue of her career choice, thus the character experiences physical sickness as a result of anxiety, and conveniently forgets the lunch date with Dad so as to avoid an unpleasant confrontation. The causality of each action can be gleaned from its relationship to the occurrence previous. This is how successfully constructed plots act as a conduit for universals.
Brooks finds specific, concrete particulars a required form for poetry. Particulars become metaphor. Brooks claims that metaphors, even as they risk obscuring larger themes, are absolutely necessary because "direct statement lends to abstraction and threatens to take us out of poetry altogether"(758). Making a direct statement is the equivalent to performing the drama Antigone by having Creon walk onto a bare stage to pronounce "pride leads to destruction" and then make his exit. The end. But not really even an end, or it can�t be called such, for there was no beginning or middle; there was not story, no showing without telling, in other words, no metaphor. Brooks finds poetry an effective conduit for universals precisely because the concrete language used in the creation of metaphor shies away from abstraction.
As is hinted in the previous dramatic example, particulars create meaning in the Poetics as well. Character, second to plot in the Aristotelian hierarchy of structure, is the particular, or the seed out of which actions grow. The generalizations which may be reasoned from the actions of characters concern "what sort of man turns out to say or do what sort of thing according to probability or necessity"(48). Poetry takes human beings as its subject (if for no other reason than because its structural element�language�is necessarily human), and attempts to make explanation of the human condition in terms of causes and effects of human actions.
Elements of structure serve as conduits for meaning in the theories of Brooks and Aristotle. Irony and plot function similarly to create meaning through indirection; both refuse direct statement of abstract creeds. Both rely on an organic unity of parts to produce an imitation of life, which is superior in its ability to communicate universals. If nothing else, a comparison between the Brooks� New Criticism and Aristotelian mimesis reveals them as formalist theories, concerned with meaning inherent to the structure of the artifact itself, whether it be poetry or drama.
=======================
Tension in Poetry
-John Orley Allen Tate
Many poems that we ordinarily think of as good poetry -- and some, besides, that we neglect -- have certain common features that will allow us to invent, for their sharper apprehension, the name of a single quality. I shall call that quality tension. In abstract language, a poetic work has distinct quality as the ultimate effect of the whole, and that whole is the “result” of a configuration of meaning which it is the duty of the critic to examine and evaluate. In setting forth this duty as my present procedure I am trying to amplify a critical approach that I have used on other occasions, without wholly giving up the earlier method, which I should describe as the isolation of the general ideas implicit in the poetic work.
Mass language is the medium of “communication,” and its users are less interested in bringing to formal order what is sometimes called the “affective state” than in arousing that state.
Once you have said that everything is One it is obvious that literature is the same as propaganda; once you have said that no truth can be known apart from the immediate dialectical process of history it is obvious that all contemporary artists must prepare the same fashionplate. It is clear too that the One is limited in space as well as time, and the no less Hegelian Fascists are right in saying that all art is patriotic.
What Mr. William Empson calls patriotic poetry sings not merely on behalf of the State; you will find it equally in a lady-like lyric and in much of the political poetry of our time. It is the poetry of the mass language, very different from the “language of the people” which interested the late W. B. Yeats. For example:
What from the splendid dead
We have inherited---
Furrows sweet to the grain, and the weed subdued---
See now the slug and the mildew plunder.
Evil does overwhelm
The larkspur and the corn;
We have seen them go under.
From this stanza by Miss Millay we infer that her splendid ancestors made the earth a good place that has somehow gone bad -- and you get the reason from the title: “Justice Denied in Massachusetts.” How Massachusetts could cause a general desiccation, why (as we are told in a footnote to the poem) the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti should have anything to do with the rotting of the crops, it is never made clear. These lines are mass language: they arouse an affective state in one set of terms, and suddenly an object quite unrelated to those terms gets the benefit of it; and this effect, which is usually achieved, as I think it is here, without conscious effort, is sentimentality. Miss Millay’s poem was admired when it first appeared about ten years ago, and is no doubt still admired, by persons to whom it communicates certain feelings about social justice, by persons for whom the lines are the occasion of feelings shared by them and the poet. But if you do not share those feelings, as I happen not to share them in the images of desiccated nature, the lines and even the entire poem are impenetrably obscure.
I am attacking here the fallacy of communication in poetry. (I am not attacking social justice.) It is no less a fallacy in the writing of poetry than of critical theory. The critical doctrine fares ill the further back you apply it; I suppose one may say -- if one wants a landmark -- that it began to prosper after 1798; for on the whole nineteenth-century English verse is a poetry of communication. The poets were trying to use verse to convey ideas and feelings that they secretly thought could be better conveyed by science (consult Shelley’s Defense), or by what today we call, in a significantly bad poetic phrase, the Social Sciences. Yet possibly because the poets believed the scientists to be tough, and the poets joined the scientists in thinking the poets tender, the poets stuck to verse. It may scarcely be said that we change this tradition of poetic futility by giving it a new name, Social Poetry. May a poet hope to deal more adequately with sociology than with physics? If he seizes upon either at the level of scientific procedure, has he not abdicated his position as poet?
At a level of lower historical awareness than that exhibited by Mr. Edmund Wilson’s later heroes of the Symbolist school, we find the kind of verse that I have been quoting, verse long ago intimidated by the pseudo-rationalism of the Social Sciences. This sentimental intimidation has been so complete that, however easy the verse looked on the page, it gave up all claim to sense. (I assume here what I cannot now demonstrate, that Miss Millay’s poem is obscure but that Donne’s “Second Anniversarie” is not.) As another example of this brand of obscurity I have selected at random a nineteenth-century lyric, “The Vine,” by James Thomson:
The wine of love is music,
And the feast of love is song:
When love sits down to banquet,
Love sits long:
Sits long and rises drunken,
But not with the feast and the wine;
He reeleth with his own heart,
That great rich Vine.
The language here appeals to an existing affective state; it has no coherent meaning either literally or in terms of ambiguity or implication; it may be wholly replaced by any of its several paraphrases, which are already latent in our minds. One of these is the confused image of a self-intoxicating man-about-town. Now good poetry can bear the closest literal examination of every phrase, and is its own safeguard against our irony. But the more closely we examine this lyric, the more obscure it becomes; the more we trace the implications of the imagery, the denser the confusion. The imagery adds nothing to the general idea that it tries to sustain; it even deprives that idea of the dignity it has won at the hands of a long succession of better poets going back, I suppose, to Guinizelli:
Al cor gentil ripara sempre Amore
Come alla selva augello in la verdura
What I want to make clear is the particular kind of failure, not the degree, in a certain kind of poetry. Were we interested in degrees we might give comfort to the nineteenth century by citing lines from John Cleveland or Abraham Cowley, bad lyric verse no better than “The Vine,” written in an age that produced some of the greatest English poetry. Here are some lines from Cowley’s “Hymn: to light,” a hundred-line inventory of some of the offices performed by the subject in a universe that still seems to be on the whole Ptolemaic; I should not care to guess the length the poem might have reached under the Copernican system. Here is one of the interesting duties of light:
Nor amidst all these Triumphs does thou scorn
The humble glow-worm to adorn,
And with those living spangles gild,
(O Greatness without Pride!) the Bushes of the Field.
Again:
The Violet, springs little Infant, stands,
Girt in thy purple Swadling-bands:
On the fair Tulip thou dost dote;
Thou cloath’st it in a gay and party-colour’d Coat.
This, doubtless, is metaphysical poetry; however bad the lines may be -- they are pretty bad -- they have no qualities, bad or good, in common with “The Vine.” Mr. Ransom has given us, in a remarkable essay, “Shakespeare at Sonnets” (The World’s Body, 1938), an excellent description of this kind of poetry: “The impulse to metaphysical poetry…consists in committing the feelings in the case…to their determination within the elected figure.” That is to say, in metaphysical poetry the logical order is explicit; it must be coherent; the imagery by which it is sensuously embodied must have at least the appearance of logical determinism: perhaps the appearance only, because the varieties of ambiguity and contradiction possible beneath the logical surface are endless, as Mr. Empson has demonstrated in his elucidation of Marvel’s “The Garden.” Here it is enough to say that the development of imagery by extension, its logical determinants being an Ariadne’s thread that the poet will not permit us to lose, is the leading feature of the poetry called metaphysical.
“The Vine” is a failure in denotation. “Hymn: to light” is a failure in connotation. The language of “The Vine” lacks objective content. Take “music” and “song” in the first two lines; the context does not allow us to apprehend the terms in extension; that is, there is no reference to objects that we may distinguish as “music” and “song”; the wine of love could have as well been song, its feast music. In “Hymn: to light,” a reduction to their connotations of the terms violet, swadling-bands, and light (the last being represented by the pronoun thou) yields a clutter of images that may be unified only if we forget the firm denotations of the terms. If we are going to receive as valid the infancy of the violet, we must ignore the metaphor that conveys it, for the metaphor renders the violet absurd; by ignoring the diaper, and the two terms associated with it, we cease to read the passage, and begin for ourselves the building up of acceptable denotations for the terms of the metaphor.
Absurd: but on what final ground I call these poems absurd I cannot state as a principle. I appeal to the reader’s experience, and invite him to form a judgment of my own. It is easy enough to say, as I shall say in detail in a moment, that good poetry is a unity of all the meanings from the furthest extremes of intension and extension. Yet our recognition of the action of this unified meaning is the gift of experience, of culture, or, if you will, our humanism. Our powers of discrimination are not deductive powers, though they may be aided by them; they wait rather upon the cultivation of our total human powers, and they represent a special application of those powers to a single medium of experience -- poetry.
I have referred to a certain kind of poetry as the embodiment of the fallacy of communication: it is a poetry that communicates the affective state, which (in terms of language) results from the irresponsible denotations of words. There is a vague grasp of the “real” world. The history of this fallacy, which is as old as poetry but which towards the end of the eighteenth century began to dominate not only poetry, but other arts as well--its history would probably show that the poets gave up the language of denotation to the scientists, and kept for themselves a continually thinning flux of peripheral connotations. The companion fallacy, to which I can give only the literal name, the fallacy of mere denotation, I have also illustrated from Cowley: this is the poetry which contradicts our most developed human insights in so far as it fails to use and direct the rich connotation with which language has been informed by experience.
We return to the inquiry set for this discussion: to find out whether there is not a more central achievement in poetry than that represented by either of the extreme examples that we have been considering. I proposed as descriptive of that achievement, the term tension. I am using the term not as a general metaphor, but as a special one, derived from lopping the prefixes off the logical terms extension and intension. What I am saying, of course, is that the meaning of poetry is its “tension,” the full organized body of all the extension and intension that we can find in it. The remotest figurative significance that we can derive does not invalidate the extensions of the literal statement. Or we may begin with the literal statement and by stages develop the complications of metaphor: at every stage we may pause to state the meaning so far apprehended, and at every stage the meaning will be coherent.
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