Research Methodology (E-C- 302)

Name: Zindagi V. Rathod

Paper: Research Methodology (E-C- 302)

Roll no. : I3

Year: 2010-11

Semester : I

Topic: The Scholar’s Life

Submitted to, :-

Dr.Dilip Barad

Department of English

Bhavnagar University.

The Scholar’s Life

               Literary scholars never cease being scholars. Today the great majority of them earn their living as members of teaching faculties in colleges and universities throughout the world. 

             That academical honors’, or any others should be conferred with exact proportion to merit, is more than human judgment or human integrity have given reason to expect.

-        Samuel Johnson , A journey to the Western Isles(London,1774)

Scholar’s have responsibilities quite remote from the pursuit of knowledge. But in the midst of alien affairs that necessarily command their talents and energies as teachers, administrators, and academic committee members, and in their private roles as spouses, parents, and participants in community activities and other good works, scholars cannot suppress, even if they wished to do so, that portion of their consciousnessthat insists on asking questions about literary matters and seeking answers.

     Professionalized literary scholarship is now old enough to possess its own pantheon of revered figures, most of whom were teachers in American institutions of higher learning or were their counterparts in British universities.

Those groundbreakers in the profession, the commanding figures during the “golden age” when research dominated English studies from the 1920s through the 1960s, thought of themselves as being first and foremost explores of literary history and biography whose great design was to add to the world’s store of literary knowledge – to provide the factual materials by which they and ideally the reading public at large might better understand and evaluate a work of art. Some historians and critics of our profession claim for the early formative decades a now lost breadth of learning and intellectual rigor .Opposing this constriction of interest, and perhaps more influential in the long run, has been the expanding tendency of other structuralism and poststructuralist theories that have, among other effects, broadened the traditional canon to embrace numerous kinds of writing, gender and ethnic-oriented works, for example, that previously were considered to lie outside the pale of “literature.” The scope of English studies now also includes writing theory and pedagogy. Precise figures on the present size of the profession are hard to come by, but because it constitutes the largest component of the umbrella organization, the Modern Language Association, some indication of the latter’s size can suggest the magnitude of the former. The study of literature remains at base an intensely private pursuit. In research, then, there are numerous perquisites: the constant company of books, the pleasures of travel, the unlooked for adventure, the frequent encounter with delightful and helpful people.     

Post-Colonial Literature (E-C-305-C)

Name: Zindagi V. Rathod

Paper: Post-Colonial Literature (E-C-305-C)

Roll no. : I3

Year: 2010-11

Semester : I

Topic: Orientalism -By Edward Said

Submitted to, :-

Dr.Dilip Barad

Department of English

Bhavnagar University.

Orientalism- by Edward Said

         Post- colonism refers to asset of theories in Philosophy and literature that grapple with the legacy of colonial rule. In this sense, post-colonial literature may be considered a branch of postmodern literature concerned with the political and cultural independence of peoples formerly subjugated in colonial empires.

              In the field of post colonial Studies has been gaining prominence since the 1970s. Some would date its rise in the Western academy from the publication of Edward Said’s influential critique of Western construction of the Orient in his 1978 book, Orientalism. The growing currency within the academy of the term postcolonial was consolidated by the appearance in 1989 of The Empire Writes  Back: Theory and Practice in Post colonial Literature by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin.

            November 1, 1935 – September 24, 2003; was a well-known Palestinian American literary theorist, critic, and outspoken pro-Palestinian activist.  He was a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is regarded as a founding figure in post colonial theory.

                       Said is best known for describing and critiquing “Orientalism,” which he perceived as a constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes towards the East. In Orientalism, Said described the “subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their cultural.”  He argued that a long tradition of false and romanticized images of Asia and the middle East in Western cultural had served as an implicit justification for Europe and America’s colonial and imperial ambitions. Just as fiercely, he denounced the practice of Arab elites who internalized the American and British orientalists ideas of Arabic culture.

                   In 1980 Said criticized what he regarded as poor understanding of the Arab cultural in the West. So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Moslems and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that valuable to military aggression.

        Orientalism has had a significant impact on the fields of literary theory and cultural studies, and to a lesser extent on those of History and Studies. Taking his from the work of Jacques Derrida and Michel  Foucault acknowledging the influence of the latter, but not the former, and from earlier critics of western Orientalism such whose influence also went unacknowledged, Said argued that all Western writings on the orient, and the perceptions of the East purveyed in them, can not be taken value.

           According to Said, the history of European colonial rule and political domination over the East distorts the writings of even the most knowledgeable, meaning and sympathetic Western Orientalists. Said’s contention was that Europe had dominated Asia politically so completely for so long, that in Orientalist writings a very considerable exists in even the most outwardly objective  of texts, which most Western scholars would not even be able to recognize, cause it is part of their cultural makeup too. His contention was that the West has not only conquered the East politically, but that Western scholars have appropriated the exploration and interpretation of the Orient’s language, history, and cultural for themselves.

       Said’s book attracted both adulation and criticism from the very outset. Said devoted much less attention to the British Raj in India, by far the lengthiest and most successful example of European hegemony in the Orient.

       Both supporters of Edward Said and his critics acknowledge the profound, transformative influence which his book Orientalism has had across the spectrum of the Humanities. 

E-C- 304: English Language Teaching-1

Zindagi V.Rathod

Roll no. 13

Sem. I

Paper no. E-C- 304: English Language Teaching-1

Year -2011

Topic:

Socio- cultural Dimensions of English as a Second Language

By: - Rekha Aslam

Submitted to:- Devrshi Mehta

Department of English

Bhavnagar University.

                         The study of the teaching and learning of any language has to be made keeping in view the fact that language is a social phenomenon. Language is not only an abstract system of formal, lexical and grammatical features but also fulfils social function and has to be viewed against the social context of its use. Sociolinguistic or the study of language in its social setting, began to develop in sixties. The development of sociolinguistics shifted the emphasis from an abstract study of the rules of language to concrete acts of language use.

                     Sociolinguistic studies have highlighted aspects of learning  a language in an alien environment. A language can be learned in an environment where there is no native speaker present. When a language is learned thus, there must be an underlying purpose for which it is learned.

                    The language must have some internal, social function in the community. In multilingual states, people who do not share a common mother tongue may use another language for communication. This orientation places the second language in a specified social context or situation. The social context subsumes in it, sociohistorical factors responsible for the adoption of a foreign language for internal communication in a country. This leads to a consideration of the historical development of a second language in an alien environment. Against this backdrop, let us consider the role that English plays in the status that it enjoys in official, educational and social settings.

                    Sociohistorical Background

           English in India belongs to no region or group. In a country with hundreds of mother tongues, it is , as Dasgupta (1993) calls it, the ‘ auntie tongue ‘ of all, and welcomed everywhere, though possessed by none.

    English has been accepted as the unofficial national language of India. The Radhakrishnan  Commission (1950-51:316) noted in its report that such controversies exist at the official level. For the common people, as we see, the question of the status of English is no longer a matter of dispute. However, some idea about its growth can be had from reports on educational reforms and missionary activities.

          English in India has acquired the status of the most preferred language, though it began its life  as a mere tool in the hands of some traders and their agents. The English ruled India for less than two hundred years, but their language has ruled here for much longer and it appears as if it is here to stay. Bengali- English, Urdu – English and other glossaries first appeared in the seventeenth century itself. What is known English for Specific Purposes (ESP) today, could be said to have appeared as early as the eighteenth century as special purpose glossaries.

        To a significant extent , English in India now the language  of business, commerce, education, government, industry, justice, law, mass media, politics, sciences, technology, trade, etc. In 1857, rebel soldiers had captured the telegraph system, but could not use it.

      English has also been in part the language of India’s freedom struggle. Tilak’s Maharatta, Gandhi’s Young India, and Nehru’s Indian Herald were published in English. Without English, our freedom fighters from various corners of the country would not have been able to communicate with another. The story of English in India is a fascinating one of the nativisation of a foreign language. There have been some attempts at recounting of a foreign language.

         The coastal regions of India between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries presented a baffing extent of multilingualism.  The Introduction of English in India was slow and difficult. So long as the Portuguese stayed, English was used only in the trade centers. For the transaction of daily business, interpreters, or ‘dobashas’, were much in demand.

      The spread of English in India was also contributed to by missionaries and other non-official British and Europeans. The initial effort of the missionaries started in 1614 and became more prominent after 1659. This was the time missionaries were permitted to use the ships of the East India Company. But in 1765, the policy changed and the encouragement of missionary activities was abandoned. The missionaries were the pioneers of English education in India. The standard they set for English was sufficiently high even then.  The Hindu College, later renamed the Presidency Collage, became an important centre of English education. Profit from learning English, increased the demand for English schools and English became the most important subject in the curriculum.

          Officially, the East India Company was not very enthusiastic about the education of Indians. There was a fear that this would result in losing India. English education was preferred to Sanskrit and Persian even by Indians. English was made a compulsory for five classes. The Indian attitude to English changed so much that it became a preferred language for communication even with  family members.

Conclusion:-

         This became a crucial question during the freedom struggle. Though Mahatma Gandhi wrote in English, regarded English as a window on western thought and acknowledged its importance for India, he was not happy with India’s dependence upon English. Gandhi hoped that with political independence, our infatuation with the English language would go, but English has become the preferred public language.               

The Modernist Literature

Zindagi V.Rathod

Roll no. 13

Sem. I

Paper no. E-C- 301: The Modernist Literature

Year -2011

Topic:

The Unity of The Poem

Submitted to:-

Dr.Dilip Barad

Department of English,

Bhavnagar University.

About Poet

               Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St.Louis, Missouri, in I888. He was a Descendent of an old New England family whose first member in America, Andrew Eliot (I627-I704), emigrated from East Coker, England. Future members of the family either entered the ministry or business.

In I9I7 his first volume of verse, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published. It immediately established him as a major poet, and he became, with his fellow American Ezra Pound, a leader of the revolt against the Georgian school of poetry.

Introduction:

               “The Waste Land” in I992 brought Eliot acclaim from readers and critics on both sides of the Atlantic. He was hailed as the voice of his generation and one of the greatest poets of the century. In I927, the poet became e British citizen and about the same time converted to the Anglican Catholic faith. He declared himself an Anglican in religion, a royalist in politics, and a classicist in Literature.

              The poem is criticized as asset of short poems tacked together, a piece of literary carpentry, pompous parade of erudition, a sort of scholarly nonsense….

              It is because of fragmentary and formlessness of the poem. Its collage of various vignettes, various pictures put together….
              There is, in Eliot’s work, a remarkable unity. Each volume of poetry that he published marked a distinct stage in his spiritual development. Until about I930 and the publication of “ash Wednesday,” it was not clear to Eliot’s admirers that he was a religious poet.

T.S.Eloit has used a number of devises to impart of unity to this poem.

Ø Tiresias as a Unifying Link:

Tiresias – a mythical character: Tiresias, in Greek mythology, a seer, or prophet, from Thebes, said to have been struck blind by the goddess Athena because he had seen her bathing. Athena compensated Tiresias with the gift of prophecy. Tiresias played a prominent part in Theban legends, delivering prophecies to Oedipus, king of Thebes.

Ø Importance of Tiresias: He is connecting link between past and the present. He is bi-sexual, he has had most varied experience and so he symbolizes human consciousness, the knowledge and experience acquired by the race through the ages.

Ø Tiresias, blind and spiritually embittered, old and impotent, who is the protagonist of the poem in The Waste Land, wandering about in great quest, stands for modern man in quest of true spiritual light and viable moral values.

Ø He is spectator and reporter of the happenings.

Ø What he sees is the substance of the poem.

Ø He had the burning experience of the fire of lust both as a man and a woman, so he was the fittest person to comment on the same.

Ø He is the fittest representative of complete humanity burning in the fire of lust because he is both man and woman…

Ø The whole poem is Teresa’s stream of consciousness.

.         2.   Oneness of characters and experience: Not only does Tiresias melt into the other character of the poem, but the melting of the characters, into each other is, of course, as aspect of the general process. Thus Elizabeth, the Hyacinth girl and three Thames Nymphs, melt into each other. The effected created is a sense of oneness of experience, and of the unity of all periods.

Ø      3. The Mythical Method: The mythical method consists in seeking analogies for the present in the past. The advantages:

Ø     Myths form the part of collective consciousness. It helps poet in communicating his meaning with minimal explanation.

Ø     It shows that the present spiritual predicament is an ever-recurring phenomenon and so a universal significance is imparted to it.

Ø        Refer to theme of sexual perversion and use of myth – three waste land used as objective correlatives to express poets emotions for the current waste land which is Europe after world war.

     4. The sequence of Pictures- modern technique of cinematography:

Ø Successive Clippings, after a few readings fix tmselves in memory and convey a coherent whole of meaning.

Ø This sequence of pictures is central to the poem.

Ø         5. Continuity of Time:

Ø       The development in Modern psychology has changed the concept of time – the past, the present and the future are viewed as a continuing whole.

               6. The Structure:

Ø The structure is that of spiral up and down. The poem proceeds with deeper and deeper probing into the modern malaise.

“The Waste Land” is a profoundly moving evocation of the horror of meaningless existence.

 From the perspective of Eliot’s later work, we can recognize that the despair the poet expresses has its roots in the absence of religious faith.

Though Eliot’s poetry was clearly rooted in his own spiritual experiences, it cannot be considered personal poetry.

Eliot’s own state of mind, for instance, during the period in which he wrote “The Waste Land” is made to reflect the spiritual crisis of his generation and also to see that crisis as a common experience throughout human history during periods in which religious faith is flickering.

During the forty odd years since the publication of “The Waste Land”, critics and scholars have explicated the many erudite and esoteric allusions and myths that Eliot crammed into that poem, but perceptive readers of the poem during the I920s were deeply moved by it even if they did not recognize all the allusions and    quotations.

Eliot’s characteristic device of juxtaposing startling images is derived from the French symbolists, particularly Laforague.

Eliot rejected the Georgian poet’s emphasis upon meter and rhyme because he believed that verse technique had to develop from the feeling and thought of the poem rather than being superimposed upon them.