EC 303 American Literature

Paper Name            : EC 303 American Literature

Name                        : Amita C. Jani

 Roll No.                   : 10

Semester                 : III

Topic                          : The Scarlet Letter: Thematic Study of novel

Date                           : 22/10/2011

Submitted to          : Dr.Dilip Barad

                                      Department of English,

                                      Bhavnagar University.

About the Scarlet Letter :

The scarlet letter is considered Nathaniel Hawthorne’s most famous novel and first quintessentially American novel in style, theme and language set in seventeenth century puritan Massachusetts. the novel centers around the travels of Hester Prynne, who gives birth to a daughter Pearl after an adulterous affair. Hawthorne’s novel is concerned with the effect of the affair rather than the affair itself, using Hester’s public shaming as a springboard to explore the lingering taboos of puritan new England in contemporary society.

The scarlet letter was an immediate success for a number of reasons. First and foremost, the United States was one hundred year old at the time of the novel’s publication. Hawthorne’s novel offered a uniquely American style, language, set of characters and most importantly a uniquely American central dilemma. Beside entertainment then Hawthorne’s novel had the possibility of goading change, since it addresses a topic that was still relatively controversial, even taboo. But Hawthorne was not concerned with a puritan affair here, though novel’s characters are. Hawthorne choose to leave out the details of the adulterous rendezvous between Hester and Dimmesdale entirely he was concerned with the after math of the affair – the shaming of Hester, the raising of a child born of sin, and the values of a society that would allow a sin to continue to be punished long after it would seem reasonable. Hawthorne takes advantage of his greatest assets as a writer – the interiority of his writing, his exploration of thoughts and emotions and uses them to humanize all the parties involved in the affair, as well as to demonize the thoughts that consumed by it. Chilling worth, notably, becomes the embodiment of puritan values, which led people to lynch and destroy in the name of God, but motivated in large measure by the people’s own repressed sins of lust, greed and envy.

The Scarlet Letter also becomes intensely popular upon publication because it holds the good fortune of becoming one of America’s first mass published books. The novel becomes equivalent of semi political track and subject of endless discussion and debate. No doubt influencing change, the Scarlet Letter has been adapted many times on film, on television and on the stage. The first film was a 1917 black and white silent film. While the most recent and much maligned film version opened in 1995 staring Demy Moore and Gamy Oldman. Thus novel became popular not only with the masses, it was heralded as “appropriate” reading deposit its attention to adulterous love.

Major themes :

1)      Public Guilt v/s Private Guilt :

Perhaps the foremost purpose of the Scarlet Letter is to illustrate the difference between shaming someone in public and allowing him or her to suffer the consequences of an unjust act privately. According to the bible, adultery was capital sin that required the execution of both adulterer and adulteress – or at the very least, serve public corporal punishment. Even if the husband wanted to keep his wife alive after she committed adultery, the law insists that she would have to die for it. It is in this environment that Hester commits adultery with Dimmensdale, but we come to see that the public shaming cannot begin to account for all the complexities of the illicit relationship or the context of it what, Hawthorne sets out to portray, private torture and guilt and emotional destruction of the people involved in the affair, are more than enough punishment for the crime. We wonder whether the state or society has any right to impose law in private matters between citizens. Does adultery really have no impact upon the lives of others? If not it should not be seen as a crime against the village and the Bible reading says that the public need not step into punish a crime when we ourselves have our own sins to be judged. Each person, suffers enough already for his or her own sins.  

2)      Punishment v/s Forgiveness :

One of the more compeering themes of the novel’s embodied by Chillingwarth who seems the arbiter of moral judgment in the story, since Dimmesdale – the minister and the supposed purveyor of righteousness – is himself tainted as a crime. Chillingwarth is surprisingly forgiving of Hester’s crime. We sense that he understands why she would forsake him. After all, he is deformed he is older; he has not been nearby, while she is beautiful and passionate. We get the feeling that Chillingwarth’s self-loathing a ways him to forgive Hester, but this attribute also increases the relentless and rage which he goes after Dimmesdale. In Dimmesdale desires and while he himself does not possess, like a leech, he’s out to suck the minister for his life force, not just to punish with his wife, but also symbolically appropriate Dimmesdale’s virility, and as the novel continues Chillingwarth seems to grow stronger while Dimmesdale seems to grow weaken. That pattern continues until Dimmesdale dies in an act of defiance, his public demonstration of guilt, which essentially leaves Chillingwarth stripped bare of his power to punish or forgive.

3)      The Scarlet Letter :

The Scarlet Letter is symbolic in a number of different ways, but perhaps most in the ways that the sinner’s choose to wear it. Hawthorne’s generative image for the novel was that of a woman charged with adultery and forced to wear the letter. A upon her clothes, but upon wearing it decided to add fancy embroidery as if to appropriate the letter as a point of pride. Hawthorne read about this choice in an actual case in 1844, recorded it in his journal, and thus the Scarlet Letter was born as Hester Prynne’s story. Hester, a knitter by trade, sees the letter as a burden lay on by the society, an act of community – enforced quit that she is forced to bear, even though it seems to make little difference for her private thoughts. Dimmesdale, however, as the town minister, wear his own Scarlet. A burned upon his flesh, since it is the community’s range, he fears the most. Thus we see the difference between a woman who has made peace with the crime publically confesses and endure the suffering the community imposes, and a man who imposes his own punishment because he cannot bear to reveal the crime to the community.

4)      Sin and Judgment :

Hawthrone’s novel consistently calls into question the notion of sin and what is necessary for redemption. Is Hester’s initial crime is a sin? She married Chillingwarth without quite understanding the commitment she made and then she had to live without him while he as ‘abroad’, then fell in love with Dimmesdale – perhaps discovering feeling for the first time. Is the sin, then community adultery with Dimmesdale and breaking her vow and commitment or is the sin first marrying Chillingwarth without thinking it through and what is Chillingwarth’s sin? Essentially, abandonees or failure to forgive her once he knew of the crime? Is Dimmesdale’s sin his adultery or his hypocritical failure to change his sermon themes after the fact? Or are all of these things sins of different degrees? For each kind of sin, we wonder if the punishment fits the crime and what be done, if anything to redeems the sinner in the eyes of society as well as in the eyes of the sinner himself. We also should remember that what the puritans thought of as sin was different from what went for sin in Hawthorne’s time, both being different from what many Christians thinks of as sin today. This should not teach us moral relativism, but it should encourage us to be way of judging others.

5)      Civilization v/s Wilderness :

Pearl embodies the theme of wilderness over against civilization. After all, she is a kind of embodiment of the Scarlet Letter: Wild, passionate and completely obvious to the rules, mores and legal structure of the time. Pearl is innocence, in way, an individualistic passionate innocence. So long as Dimmesdale is alive, Pearl seems to be a magnet that attracts Hester and Dimmesdale, but as soon as Dimmesdale dies, Pearl seems to lose her vigor and becomes a natural girl, able to marry and assimilate into society. The implication is thus that Pearl truly was a child of lust or love, a product of activity outside the boundaries imposed by strict puritan society.

6)      The Town v/s The Woods :

In the town, Hester usually is confronted with the legal and moral consequences of her crime. Governor comes to take her child away, Chillingwarth reminds her of her deed, and she faces Dimmesdale in the context of sinner. But whenever Hester leaves the town and enters the woods, a traditional symbol of unbridled passion without boundaries, she is free to rediscover herself. The woods also traditionally emblematize darkness. In the darkness of night, Hester is free to meet Dimmesdale, to confess her misgivings and to live apart from the torment and burdens of the guilt enforced by the community.

7)      Memories v/s Present :

Hester Prynne’s offense against society occurred seven years earlier, but she remains punished for it. Hester learned remains punished for it. Hester learned to forgive herself for her adultery but society continues to scorn her for it. Hester reaches peace with her affair and in that peace comes to see the town as insufficiently forgiving in its thoughts and attitudes. Pearl is enough of a reminder of the wild choices in her past and as Pearl grows up, Hester continues to live in the present rather than in the past. Reverend Dimmesdale, mean while, is seems to reflect the town’s tendency to punish long after the offense. In suppressing his own confession, Dimmensdale remains focused on coming to terms with a sinful past instead of looking squarely at the problems of the present.

8)      The Custom House :

The custom house is largely an autobiography sketch describing Hawthorn’s life as an administrator of the Salem custom house. It was written to enlarge the tale of the Scarlet Letter, since Hawthorne deemed the story too short to print by itself. It also serves as an excellent essay on society during Hawthorne’s times, and it allows Hawthorne to add an imaginative device the romantic pretense of having manuscript of the Scarlet Letter in the custom house.

9)      The Nature of Evil :

The characters in the novel frequently debate the identity of the “Black Man”, the embodiment of evil. Over the course of the novel, the “Black Man” is associated with Dimmesdale, Chillingwarth, Minister Hibbins and little Pearl is thought by some to be the Devil’s child.

The character also tries to root out the causes of evil:

                    I.            Did Chillingwarth’s selfishness in marrying Hester force her to the “Evil” she committed in Dimmesdale’s arms?

                  II.            Is Hester and Dimmesdale’s deed responsible for Chillingwarth’s transformation into a malevolent being?

                III.            The nature of evil is symbolically reflected in different interpretation of superstitious symbolically “Black Man”.

10)   Identity and Society :

After Hester is publically names and forced by the people of Boston to wear a badge of humiliation, her unwillingness to leave the town may seem puzzling. She is not physically imprisoned and leaving the Massachusetts Bay colony would allow her to remove the Scarlet Letter and resume a former life. Surprisingly, Hester reacts with dismay when Chillingwarth tease her that the town fathers are considering letting her remove the letter. Hester’s behavior is premised on her desire to determine it for her. To her running away of removing the letter would be an acknowledgement of society’s power over her. She would be admitting that the letter is a mark of shame and something from which she desire to escape. Instead Hester, refiguring the Scarlet Letter as a symbol of her own experience and character. Her past sin is a part of which she is to pretend that is never happened would mean denying a part of her. This Hester very determinedly integrates her sin into her life.

Dimmesdale also struggles against a socially determined identity. As the community’s minister, he is more symbol than human being. Except for Chillingwarth, those around the minister awfully ignore his obvious anguish, misinterpreting it as holiness. Unfortunately, Dimmesdale never fully recognize the truth of what Hester has learned; that individually and strength are gained by quite self-assertion and by a reconfiguration, not a resection, of one’s assigned identity.

E-C- 304. English Teaching Language-1

Paper Name            : E-C- 304. English Teaching Language-1

Name                        : Amita C. Jani

 Roll No.                   : 10

Semester                 : III

Topic                          : Role of English in India

Date                           : 22/10/2011

Submitted to          : Mr. Devarshi Mehta

                                      Department of English,

                                      Bhavnagar University.

Satan and Saraswati: The Double Face of English in India

– E. ANNAMALAI

Abstract:

English plays a conflicting double role in India in policy and practice in public platform, private choice and in symbolic allegiance and instrumental use. After independence a pattern of bilingualism has emerged at the executive, legislative, legal and educational domains with English and an Indian language. At the popular level, however, preference for English has increased in spite of political opposition to it.

Here, in this paper presenter presents the issue related to India and Indian language that Indian policy and practice in language policy means language education and their rules and regulations but this policy do not have a flexibility to serves or to put that policy into practice and to put that partly you have to see India as a society. Two points are important here:

1)      Socio-philosophical dimension of language

2)      Socio-psychological dimension of language

But after putting this policy, problem is how far the policy is successful change the color of the society. So here we saw that in India, policy is faithful but practice is not faithful.

In India English used as the instrumental tool, mean it become the medium of education and we can do any courses in Indian as a selecting English as a medium of language or education. English is also symbol of national unity so it becomes Lanfranc – means common in all state. Although Hindi is our national language, very few people have accepted Hindi as our national language but English become bilingualism language of people. So this pattern is visible in India so there are advantages as English as our national language and some disadvantages also we find while using English as a language.

English as Saraswati:

There are some benefits of using English language like in past India has not official language, we did not know that we can make Hindi as our official language so people came and make English as our official language in India. British came and give us all the rules, terms and condition were prepared n English, not in our language.

India has two official languages: English and Hindi.

But Gujarat has three official languages: English, Hindi and Gujarati. English became language of education, modernization so every when we rebel, we used English not Hindi.

Example: Raja Rao

Whatever he writes, he writes in English because he wants to write for all India. So after accepting English as our second language, English contribute a lot one or another form. English people also remove out superstitions so in India English was the language of change. Even English people came and give us required systems like Education system, Postal service and Railway system. So in that way giving all this benefit, British connect all states by giving English as a link language.

English as proved Satan in India:

English also proved as Satan in India because English is not used in lower level – in a particular situation, so English cannot be the language of day-to-day conversation in India and it has only become medium to go for higher education and the age of specialization. So our Gujarati medium schools prove as not best in schools.

English is not our goal but our need. Even our policy makers are not well educated in India. The same was teacher of English do not get support of other faculties in India. Even in Gujarat also English is still a foreign tongue or language. Culture also effect a while speaking English because we cannot speaking English because we cannot express our feelings or idea in English or we cannot translate our myths or culture in English. In India we have failed to make English an interesting subject. It is only used in India as our personality, style, look and far other things but not as a language. We learnt English as a subject but not as language.

Teaching English as a Second Language in India: Focus on objectives. 

- SHRIVENDU K. VERMA 

Abstract:

After highlighting certain theoretical aspects of the notion “Objectives of language teaching”, we discuss the functionally determined sub-categorization of language into first language, second language and foreign language. We then focus on the objectives of teaching English as a second language in india.

The objectives of Language Teaching:

Every language has its function means it plays very big role in education, constitution, parliament at that time Indian people never use Hindi but they used English as language.

When this language interacts with our language or became a link language. It became more and richer. It earned new words and accepted many words from other language and became multilingual. But for Indian student, it is very difficult to learn the new structure.

Learning any language must be passive and it must include interaction process of learner. Learning language is not just the produce sentences which are grammatically appreciable but also it must include two important things that what to say and how to say? Your learner should expose to target language and there must be variety so expose learner to different variety, different situations in which target language is used.

Example: Foyer – large room

It only used in hotel so using English as a language they must capable to use English at different situation and different context.

Concentrate of four skills, according to their role; they have to select their language. But at that time a teacher of life and vigor, resourcefulness and innovative power and it must be living model or active in classroom activities.

Functionally determined subcategories:

1)      First Language (L1):

Education must be in mother language otherwise the feeling of language will never come. L1 is indispensable of national culture. It is the primary means for the transmission of culture from one generation to another generation. Learning through the mother language is the most potent and comprehensive medium for the expression of the student’s entire personality.

2)      Second Language (L2):

L2 may be used as an auxiliary or associate language as a slot filler, it performing those functions which are not normally performed through L1. English as a second language or interstate or international link language, it also used as international language of knowledge, trade and industry. L2 is more associated with medium of instruction at all level or at particular level. In India L2 is also used as official language.

3)      Foreign Language :

It is used by a select group of learners in a very restricted set of situation. The main objective of learning a foreign language is to have direct access to the speakers of these languages and their cultures. It enables the learners to participate in a foreign society in certain roles and certain situations. Your L2 can be your foreign language.

4)      Classical Language :

A classical language like Sanskrit provides access to ancient culture, learning and philosophy of life and is assumed to contribute it the intellectual enrichment of its learners. Its real value cannot be measured in terms of what it helps you do in everyday life but in terms of refining your sensibility and sharpening your tails of analysis, enriching the modern language and offering “insight” into a variety of linguistic problems.

Objectives of teaching English as a second language in India:

There are some objectives of teaching English as a second language in India. Those are like this what are roles of Hindi, English, regional languages, classical language, foreign language and language of minority group in our multilingual setting? What are the topics and situations that will necessitate the use of English? What is the kind and amount of English that the learners will need?

English language is our “Window of the world”. It become globalization language but as far as industrialism concern it is necessary in India but it also rejected in rural area of India.

English is also used for our national integration, mother tongue as well as two languages are important that are English and Hindi. But while using any language the context of logic is important and in our first language we can’t learn it easily but in L2 we can learn it.

English also cannot be used as our “library language” and all classical books are translated in English so we can get knowledge from English.

English is also proved as a language of opportunity in India because in India with the knowledge of English one can easily earn money or can be rich so it is also proved as a language of opportunities in India.

Teaching of English: A Plea for Practical Attitude

            – R.K. SINGH

Abstract:

English in India is a potential national resource. It is important to develop tolerance and positive attitudes towards English practical approaches can be adopted in the areas of its teaching by making it move need based, flexible and innovative.

Practical approaches can be adopted in the areas of its teaching by making it more need based, flexible and innovative and it can be happen after knowing nature of the student or it must be flexible because no teaching method is perfect for learner. Means be flexible or don’t continue in same manner or keep on changes.

Need based teaching program:

By doing this type of need based teaching we can come to know about student pre-knowledge or their level or what their need to stand a particular thing are. For that, teacher has to know about student by three levels. Those are:

1)      Current level

2)      Desire level

3)      Current trend

Current level shows that where your student stands and for that take test in class. Then current trend shows how much knowledge of society your students have because you are in the society and with the change of time your knowledge must be enhanced. But question is how far this pre-knowledge help to learn more? Example, if we want to teach them adjectives then first we have to teach them about what is objective and this can we only know by knowing about their pre-knowledge and needs. At the same time they don’t need a theoretical knowledge of target language but an ability to understand language within the context.

In conclusion, practical approach must be related to student’s intellectual awareness and they deserve an opportunity to think, to provide information from their world of knowledge, to express their personal opinion and to disagree with other people at the same time. Teacher is not teacher but helpful, and teacher not take place but learning take place, so that prepare task in that way so student are intellectually involve in it.

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. 

EC-301 The Modernist Literature

Paper Name             : EC-301 The Modernist Literature

Name                        : Amita C. Jani

 Roll No.                    : 10

Semester                 : III

Topic                        : The West Land-T.S.Eliot

Date                         : 22/10/2011

Submitted to           : Dr.Dilip Barad

                                    Department of English,

                                    Bhavnagar University.

Introduction about poet and poem :

T.S. Eliot is one of the chief poets of modern age. His first volume of verse, Prufrock and other observations 1917 portrays often witty ironical satire and it shows boredom, emptiness and pessimism of its own day. In his poem poet tries to depict the depth if his contemporary life in a series of episode. By presenting vividly contrasted images in his verse, Eliot pride himself as gifted and original artist and then the poems of 1920 is in much the same mood but as often happens in Eliot’s case, the verse form is completely changed. The difficult monologue of this volume shows Eliot’s adaption of the blank verse of the later Elizabethan dramatists.

The Waste Land, first published seven years after The Love Song of S. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land is a more complex and difficult work than earlier poem. In the case of Profrock, the structural method could be justified in “dramatic” or “psychological” ground. We were following the movements of a single consciousness and we felt throughout the poem, the presence of a single voice.

The Waste Land departs even more boldly than Prufrock from conventional structure. The justification of these departures is not easy to formulate. It is generally said that The Waste Land presents the perceptions of a single consciousness is less dramatically rendered, less suggestive of an individual personality than that starling juxtaposition of The Waste Land, are therefore less clearly motivated so that shows that there is no essential unity to The Waste Land, is a question the reader will have to consider.

The Waste Land originally a much longer poem and the poem The Waste Land (1922) is made a tremendous impact on the post war journalism  and is considered one of the most important documents of its age. The poem is difficult to understand in detail but it’s general aim is clear. The poem caries out different images and because of these different images we find poem more complex and full of paradox. We find that nothing is clear in the poem and we are somehow loss in all this unclear images. Even there is no pattern in rhythm schema in the poem and this all different elements show the cultural difference and we find a erudition on the part of reader also. The poem is the representation of the moral characteristics of the age and culture. In this poem we find different elements like episode structure, cultural depertivity, and artistic trust. Revolt against tradition is the one of the effective point of the poem and in this was new form introduced by T.S. Eliot.

The poem is based on the legend of the fisher king in the Arthurian cycle; it presents modern London as an arid waste land. The poem is built round the symbol of drought and flood, representing death and rebirth and this fundamental idea is referred to throughout, other symbol in poem are, however, not capable of precise explanation. In this series of disconcertingly vivid impressions, the poem progresses by rather abrupt transitions through five movements. “The Burial of the Dead”, “The Game of Chess”, “The Fire Serman”, “Death by Water”, “What the Thunder Said..” throughout appears the figure of Tiresias, work unity. Its real unity, however, is one of the emotional atmospheres. The boredom of his earlier poetry gives way to a mood of terror in face of an outworn and disintegrating civilization.

A terror deeply felt even when hidden beneath the surface irony of some parts of the poem. The style shows a typical comprehension of clearly a visulized often metaphysical imagenary, a vocabulary essentially modern, and a subtly suggestive use of the rhythms of ordinary speech. One of its greatest difficulties lies in the numorous allusions out of the way writers, and the notes which Eliot himself provided are ofter inadequete. But inspite of its complexities and apparent ambiguities the poem is a powerfully moving presentation of sterllity and disruption.

Two parts of the poem :

1)      The Burial of the Dead :

April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land,

Mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain..

Winter kept us warm, covering earth in forgetful snow,

Feeding a little life with dried tubers…

The poem opens with a series of paradoxes. April, the month that beginning of spring with its promise of rebirth and renewal, is not usually thought of as cruel, but in the “dead land” any reminder of life is cruel, just as the awareness of a joy we cannot share provoke pain. It is equally surprising to be told that winter, season of the cold, kept the inhabitants of The Waste Land warm. What is referred to is almost a state of hibernation, a kind of death in life. To the speaker, this state is preferable to an awareness of life or to life itself.

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergerse

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,

And drank coffee and talked for an hour…

In the first of many sudden shifts of tone in this poem, the line loosens to a conversational cadence, and the language is of reminiscence, and the memory is presumably not that of the protagonist therefore expresses the memory of a memory. If the memory is a happy one, it leads nowhere. The last ward of above passage is winter and the death in life associations is relevant once again here.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this story rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say or guess, for you know on!

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound water only…

This passage is full of biblical references. The images of this passage emphasize the qualities of dryness and sterility, associated throughout with The Waste Land.

There is shadow under this red rock,

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you,

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you,

I will show you fear in a handful of dust…

The red rock offers a kind of shelter, but there is more than a hint of menace in the invitation to come under its shadow, particularly as the shadow becomes and image associated with dead and fear. The protagonist offers to show us is fear. The image of the “handful of dust” reinforces the general air of sterility in the passage. It also reminds us of the dust we are and which we shall return. Unless we find reason to think otherwise as the poem develops, we may suspect that she sterility implied here includes not only sterility in the land, but emotional and sexual sterility as well.

You gave me hyacinths first year ago; they called me the hyacinths girl,

Yet when we came, late, from the hyacinths garden,

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not,

Speak and my eyes failed, I was neither living nor dead and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence…

The principal action in these lines seems to involve a past sexual-romantic encounter in which the protagonist was unable to act. The passage begins and ends with lines from Richard Wagner’s opera. In the conclusion of the opera, Tristan, the hero, is mortally wounded and dies before Isolde, who has the power to heal him, can arrive. The first quotation comes from a sailor’s song and expresses a lover’s eager explanation for his beloved, born over the sea to him by a fresh wind. The second quotation us sung in the opera by a shepherd, who tells the dying Tristan that the sea is waste and void. The promise of love and the frustration of that promise, with an added suggestion that love is healing power. These lines, as a whole, may be regarded as fulfillment of the promise or threat.  

Madame Sosostris famous clairvoyant had a bad fold nevertheless is known to be the wisest woman in Europe with a wicked pack of cards. Here said she

Madame Sosostris is something of a comic figure. A fortune teller with a bad cold must provoke some laughter. But there is an irony here, for The Waste Land seems to suffer most from the absence of water, and a quotation from a song from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” introduces a suggestion of death by water as a transformation into something rich and strange.

The Hanged Man, whom Madame Sosostris does not see perhaps because of the limits of her and the protagonist’s perception, is traditionally associated with The Hanged God. The God sacrifices himself only to be ultimately reborn from the anthropologist’s point of view, Christ is one version of the Hanged God, but the Hanged God can be found in many non-Christian religions as well. Eliot says that he associates the man with Fisher King. In the vegetation myths the Fisher King is sexually maimed and restored by magic. This process is associated with the re-fertilization of the land in spring.

The rebirth or resurrection of the Hanged God are therefore associated, both are associated with vegetation rites intended to restore fertility to a stricken land. That Madame Sosostris does not find the hanged man suggests that there is no sign of redemption for The Waste Land. In first part of the poem, last passage is about unreal city, and the “unreal city” is London, actually a very real city, but unreal as everything in the Waste Land is unreal. The suggestion throughout is of people caught on the wheel of life, unable to break away to eternity. These associations are Buddhists. Apart from their immediate functions, the allusions to Dante, Baudelaire and the history of the panic war help to define the consciousness of the protagonist. His awareness extends to many areas of the experience if western man – enough to make us wonder if he represents western man in his modern manifestation including a modern awareness of Eastern thought.

2)      A Game of Chess :

The second major function of the waste land id constructed as an apparent contrast that turn out to be a comparison. The difference indicated of wealth, class and education are superficial in relation to the underlying similarities.  The section opens by placing a woman in a room characterized by what we might call a splendid clutter. This passage contains a number of allusions relevant to a full understanding. The opening is reminiscent of Enobarbus description of Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s anatomy and Cleopatra. This suggests an implicit comparison between Cleopatra grand symbol of the woman who gives all for love and Elliot’s woman recall the legend of the ravished Philomel transformed into a nightingale. Rape, the ultimate act of lust without love, also figures prominently in Thomas Middleton’s play - Woman Beware Woman. In the play, a young woman is raped while her mother unaware plays a game of chess downstairs. The allusions to Philomel and to Women Beware Women, then, combine to emphasize the theme of rape, which is related to the more general theme of lust without love, the principal theme of the entire section.

The splendid clutter of the room released both sensual and cultural overtones. But the disorder of the details of the details suggests failure to relate the life of the sense and modern man’s or woman’s cultural inheritance to a unifying center. The closing lines of the passage present, not an image even of sensuous fulfillment but a woman nervously brushing her hair, bursting into tense speech and lapsing into a truly savage silence.

Elliot has been accused of an undemocratic snobbery for his portray of the lower class woman in latter part of this section.

Conclusion :

The Waste Land is a landmark of poetic complexity. It attempts to represent a history of human hope and desire through those ideas that Elliot considers the metaphysical basis or reality. By metaphysical is meant those fundamental truths or values that are the well-spring and source of all human affairs, aspirations and futilities. The axiom or truth or metaphysical basis of reality is that the contracting despair of mankind is the result of the purely emotional and spiritual character of man from its intellectual cloak.