EC-302 Research Methodology

Paper Name            : EC-302 Research Methodology

Name                       : Amita C. Jani

Roll No.                    : 10

Semester                : III

Topic                       : What is Research? and Characteristic.

Date                        : 22/10/2011

Submitted to          : Dr. Dilip Barad

                                   Department of English,

                                   Bhavnagar University.

What is research?

Research is our mind set that how you have looked a particular text in a particular way or with new or different perspective. Even any event can be a part of research. No method in research methodology. The genesis of research lies in the progress of human life. As a man have a curiosity to know the happenings around his surrounding become very intense. The saga of development of man from ancient times to modern era is the result of research. Superstitions and some traditional beliefs in ancient times were used to be wrongly ascribed to knowledge. Man guardedly came out of these beliefs by way of research and inclined towards scientific knowledge. This scientific knowledge is nothing but the outcome of research.

Man from the very beginning strived to understand the nature and the universe. He also observed harmony everywhere in the universe and tried to find out the casual relationship underlying this harmony. This is how the beginning of scientific research was made.

Initially inquiry into any matter or happening was used to be made by scientific method but there was planning in making this inquiry. Much emphasis was given to experience of an individual to draw internees or conclusions from any happening in the nature or universe without any sufficient evidence or rational.

In the era of Aristotle and Greek philosophers’ new direction of research were established. Francis Bekan made a strong plea for research direct observation or experimentation. Initially deductive method of logic came into operation and later on inductive method of logic came into practice. In order to eliminate the imperfection of these methods, Charles Darwin suggests a new method deductive – inductive method of logic. The intensive use of scientific research of was initially made in physics and later on it was extended to natural sciences and social sciences. But in literature there must be universal qualities and this is what we have to prove in our research. And there must be a logical or philosophical argument in literary research there must be a citation and it should be without any plagiarism and there must be good concluding Para which must be your own idea about a particular topic.

Characteristics of Research:

1)      Vocation of Research Scholars :

Some professional students of literature prefer to regard themselves primarily as critics, some as scholars but the dichotomy between the two is far more apparent than real, and every good student of literature is constantly combining the two roles, often without knowing it. The difference is mainly one of emphasis. The critic’s business is primarily with the literary work itself – with its structure, style and content of ideas. Scholars, on the other hand, are more concerned with the facts attending its genesis and subsequent history. The ultimate beneficiary of their fact gathering is criticism. While facts have a certain charm in themselves, as every history minded person knows, the scholar values in them direct proportion to the help they afford at once or in prospect in illuminating specific pieces of literature and the interaction of many works that constitutes scholar can lack critical acumen; and the scholar’s eye is rather like the poet’s not, to be sure, “in a fine frenzy rolling”, but at least looking for something as yet unknown which it knows it will find, with perception heightened and modified by the act of looking.

No one writes in a vacuum whatever private influence are involved authors, whether conformists or rebels are the product of time and place, the mental set fatefully determined by the social and cultural environment to understand a book, we must also understand the manifold socially derive attitude the merits, the myths, the assumptions, the biases, that it reflects its author’s private self alone but for a specific contemporary audience and only incidentally for us.

Literary history constitutes one of the strands of which the history of civilization itself is woven. Literature preserves for us, for example, the poignant through held down by mortal chains! The excitement of the Reassurance awareness of the splendor that environ western mankind in the here and now. The coal and candid re-estimate of world and the human self that the eighteen century made under the auspicious of philosophy and the spiritual chiaroscuro society of waste land and earthly paradise society has been subjected in the past two centuries literature, then, is an eloquent artistic document, infinitely varied of mankind’s journey; the autobiography of the race’s soul as consequence of this recent dramatic expansion of the scope of the literary interest.

It is certain that, given a fair degree of imagination, originality of approach, solidity of learning, and the wish and the will to see works of literary art and their creators from new perspectives, everyone called to the profession will discover amplify rewarding projects.

In American during the past half century or so, most literary research has been done by academic people and publishing the results of the research has provided the traditional boost up the professional ladder.

In the second place, researchers must have a vivid sense of history, the ability to caste themselves back into another age. They must be able to adjust their inter-actual sights and imaginative responses to the systems of though and the social cultural atmosphere that prevailed in fourteenth century England or early twentieth century America.

“Learning without wisdom is a load of books on an Ass’s back” one can be a researcher, full of knowledge without also being a scholar research is the means scholarship the end. Research is an occupation; scholarship is a habit of mind and a way of life. Scholars are more than researchers for while they may be gifted in the discovery and assessment of facts, they besides, persons of broad and luminous learning.

2)      The Scholar’s Life :

Literary scholar never ceases being scholar. Today, the great majority of them earn their living as membranes of teaching faculties in colleges and universities throughout the world. A such of them have responsibilities quite remote from pursuit of knowledge. Scholars cannot suppress, even if they wished to do so, that portion of their consciousness that insists on asking questions about literary awareness keeps twenty four hour a day! The bookish excitement that has attracted them to the profession in the first places permanently their lives.

It is now almost a century since literary studies began to be professionalize that is transformed from an avocation pursued by persons who made their living as culture journalists, British civil servants, or in out occupations into what has become a highly organized and sophisticated interaction discipline countering in the academy. Professionally literary scholarship is now old enough to possess its own pantheon of revered figures, most of who were teachers in American institution of higher learning or were their counterpart in British universities W.W. Greg, A.D. Lovejoy, F.N. Robinson, Hyder Rollins, Perry Miller, Robert K. Rost, Rosamond Tuve, Helen White etc.

                                                                                    

Some historians and critics of our professions claim for the early formative decade a now lost breath of learning and intellectual rigor. Wayne Booth, for instance, has regretted the proliferation of dissertation topics that concentrate on the formal aspects of literary texts “isolated from the influences of ethics, politics, history, logic, dialectic and even grammar”. Others, like Robert Scholes consider the narrowing of focus to have occurred in another way, “bracketing out certain domains of textually in order to concentrate on others”, First excluding “all those use of the English language that were utilitarian on speculative, retaining only those that could be covered by such designations as ‘oratory’ or ‘belles letters’ and then deleting “oratory” so that all that remained was “belles letters” alone, which we learned to call by the new focused honorific title of literature.

The study of literature remains at base an intensely private pursuit. No one ever entered the profession burning with a single-minded ambition to read papers before an audience of peers or to see her original idea on a literary topic printed in a learned journal. Literary scholars probably are no more gregarious man those in other lines of work. Nonetheless, our bond of common interest of commitment to the humanistic idea in general and particular to literature as a queen of the arts is a peculiarly strong one.

Love of books and a consuming interest in the intellectual and esthetic questions they pose unite person with amazingly different background and tastes. In scholarship there is no prejudice born of national origin, oared, color or social class; we live in the tress democracy of all, the democracy of the intellect. In research, then there are numerous perquisites, the constant company of books, the pleasure of travel, the unlooked for adventure, the frequent encounter with delightful and helpful people. But we earn our perquisites with obligations. Like all professions, ours has its code of manners and ethics, the heart of which is the proposition that we are working together for the benefit of the society, not for private aggrandizement. Scientists and inventors have their patents, but in humane learning all knowledge is in the public domain. Thus, two principles emerge. First, let others know what boring them, if you are genuinely excited, your excitement bound to be contagious. The second principle is corollary to the keep up with what other people are doing; not only in your own field but in others as well maintain the same interest in their research that you hope they have in yours. If you run across something that might have escaped their attention, drop them note.

Scholars have no room for intemperate criticism of any kind, least of all in print. Differences of opinion there will always be and scholarary competence not being a gift distributed equally among all practitioners, otherwise literary study would stagnate. But the necessary process of debate and corrections can, and should be conducted with dignity and courtesy name – calling, personalities, aspersions on one’s professional ability and similar below the bells tactics are not to be condoned.

Thus scholar’s profession has ethical standards that, while unwritten are as binding as Hippocratic Oath and Bar associations canons. They are sustained by the desirability of fair play, self-respect and professional moral. Scholars sometimes are discouraged and many shares the belief, so prevalent in the world outside, that our achievements have an unreal quality, or if they are real, at least they are fulfill that they add nothing to the sum of human wisdom or happiness.

It is scholar’s responsibility to resize every opportunity to communicate with the lay audience, to educate student at all leaves to read, write and think developing in them the intellectually curious habit of mind that castes a disinterested eye over all important issues, appreciating their complexities and to lead students by extensive reading.

3)      The Spirit of Scholarship :

The scholar’s business is in part constructive – to add to the sum of knowledge relating to literature and its makers and in part constructive. Good researchers are, by virtual definition, through going skeptics. Though in personal relations they may be benevolent and trusting professionals they must cultivate a low opinion of the human capacity for truth and accuracy – beginning with them. The well spring of wisdom in research, as elsewhere in life, is self-knowledge. Human being it seems has an inherent tendency to shy away from exact truth and even though our profession enjoins upon us the most rigid standards of procedure in research and writing and to carry it to the very end, proofreading as well name of us is infallible.

Once necessary consequences of this advice is that researcher must be careful to use only the most dependable text of a literary work or a private or public document. Young scholars especially tends to forgot that there are good texts and bad, incomplete and / or unreliable editions and definitive ones. We shall have more to say about the crucial importance of reliable text but here we should note that the weak link in the in the chain that connects pre-twentieth-century authors, especially those from Chaucer’s time to the end of the eighteenth century, with modern readers is the quality of the editions that have transmitted the texts. Until the gradual professionalization of literary scholarship in the past seventy five years or so, anybody with some pretensions to literary learning could set up as an editor, often with grievous result.

Likewise, scholars must use the most dependable editions of author’s correspondences. It is axiomatic in the profession that no edition of letter published before the 1920s, at the earliest, can be relied upon. Nor can some that appeared well after that date: The text of letters in the superficially impressive nineteen volumes Shakespeare Head Bronte, published in 1932-1938, are full of errors. William Mason’s simultaneous mangling and “beautifying” of Thomas Greg’s letters (1775) is one of the most notorious examples of editorial malpractice in literary history. Infect every scholar who has had occasion to compare the pre-1926 printed texts of a literary figure’s private papers with the manuscripts themselves has blood – curdling tales to tea of the liberties their editors back. In an article we publish, something we would have discovered was an  error had we checked it.

4)      Examining the Evidence :

If scholars with to erase the mistake that are all too likely to have occurred in the process of historical transmission. Back to the documents or, in practice, to a thoroughly reliable printing thereof, if one exits, back to the people with whom our information began, back to the “collateral evidence”. But primary and collateral evidence need to be weighed every bit as careful as the statements of intermediate sources. Then there are two application of the critical spirit, fixing dates and testing authenticity.

Now-a-days, when most people’s historical perspective is unreliable regarding events that happened before their own lifetime, scholars must take particular care to cultivate an acute awareness of time, the concern of literary history is with events that occurs in a certain order and are provides a decisive answer to questions of relationship where other evidence is vague, ambiguous or simply nonexistence. By applying our sharp time sense to the documents and received narratives before us, we can often place an event more important precisely in the sequence to which it belong and even more important. In addition to chronological problem involving events whose dates are information, there are those presented by undated or questionably dated and manuscripts.