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. 

E-E-305-C. Post Colonial Literature

Paper Name           : E-E-305-C. Post Colonial Literature

Name                      : Amita C. Jani

 Roll No.                  : 10

Semester               : III

Topic                       : Black Skin, White Masks – Frantz Fanon

Date                        : 22/10/2011

Submitted to          : Dr. Dilip Barad

                                   Department of English,

                                   Bhavnagar University.

Black Skin, White Masks – Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925 and went to school there first, before moving to metropolitan France to continue his education. During the Second World War, he served in Free French Army, which took him for the first time to North Africa. After the war, he studied medicine and psychiatry at University of Lyons, completing his training in 1951. Two years he was appointed to run the psychiatry department.

Fanon’s short life would probably have been only a foot note to the end of France’s colonial empire in Africa if he had not written two books - “Black Skin, White Masks” which you hold in your hand and “The Wretched of the Earth”. In these books, Fanon explored the nature of colonialism and racism and the psychological damage they caused in colonial people and in colonizer. There are three intertwined themes in Fanon’s writing a critique of ethno psychiatry which aimed to provide an account of the mental life, in sickness and in health of colonized people and of the Euro centrism of psychoanalysis, a dialogue with negritude, then the dominant system of thought among black francophone intellectuals in which he challenges its account of the mental life of black people and the development of a political philosophy for decolonization that starts with an account of the psychological harm that colonialism had produced.

In “Black Skin, White Masks”, Fanon also develop an account of the psychological effects of the racism based, in part, on his own experiences of life among the black middle class in the French Caribbean. The dominant colonial culture, he argues identified the black skin of the Negro with imparity and the Antilleans accept this association and so come to despise themselves. Colonial women exhibit their identification with whiteness, for example by attempting neurotically to avoid black men and to get close to white men: a process Fanon dubbed “ratification”. Fanon’s approach in “Black Skin, White Masks” focuses on the problems of identity created for the colonial subject by colonial racism from these neuroses, which colonialism had produced.

“Black Skin, White Masks” is a searching indictment of colonialism; it is also hopeful invitation to a new relation between Black and White colonizers and colonized. In the last page of book he says “Move away from the inhuman voices of their respective ancestors so that a guanine communication can be born”.

The book looks at what goes through the minds of blacks and whites under the condition of white rule and the strange effect that has, especially on black people. Every now and then he says something wow that keeps you going but it is requires rereading and a good deal of thought to understand a given chapter. In the book the ward colonial refers to the geographic place and any literature is written in that freedom time started colony and its called colonial studies.

In the all chapters of his book, Fanon tries to understand some following question which can be unanswerable.

• Why we obsess with white color or white men?
• Are we happy with the color which we warn with?
• Why do we want to be white?
• What are the problems of black?
• What is mean by whiteness or blackness?

Then he talked about humanism and said that humanism cannot be white of black. He said that recognize me as a human being. His major concern in the text is, it’s difficult to mix black and white and so he asked some questions in text like...

• What does a man want?
• What does a black man wants?

It seems that a black man cannot be a mankind??

Then Fanon talks about inferiority of Black and said that money generates a dominant class means ideology. It means that a black man can become a rich than white man but it doesn’t make basic different of black and white. Then he talked about internalization and he is disagreed with Freud that black men’s problem is collective problem and he called it that is in society itself.

He talked that “I shall be derelict but he points out various attitudes of black man to white culture. In book  “Black Skin, White Masks”, first chapter of book deals with modern Negro and history of Negro and last two chapters of book deals with psychological or philosophical explanation of the state of being a Negro. Chapter four is about Mannoni’s work. Chapter five is more important because it talked about fact of blackness and how Negro looks at Negro. Then he talks about black man at home men the place where black man live. Then at general view Fanon said in this book that not only “Jungle Savage” but juxtaposition of the white and black race has created a massive complex. Then Fanon talked about self and other men he tried to say that what subject concerted is other not I.

Chapter – I: The Black Man and Language:

In this chapter talks about language that language is dimension of the other so he wants to begin with language that is language is colonization than in this chapter Fanon talks about Black Men’s two dimensions

1. Black as fellow
2. Black as others

So in this context he said that Negro behave differently with a white man and another Negro. So here in very first chapter Fanon talks about behavior problem about people and he said that you need to be free from that obsession of being black because being black is out mental condition. It’s out mental state that make you black and white and then he talks that language gives you a path and it possesses the world. Then he writes that “The white man is locked in his whiteness and the black man in his blackness”. Fanon than writes the effect of hybrid or mix effect of colonization. He said that Creole is a hybrid language or local and colonized language had in this way it’s become a Creole language. So here Fanon discussed about language and culture and in this context Fanon write in the text that..

In the end of this chapter Fanon said that blackness become the identity of black people that we are not nameless but we have our own identity. Then he said that “It’s ok you are black but in middle you are white”, means you have a capacity of white that is language.

So the conclusion of this chapter can be like this that if you do not learn the white men’s language perfectly than you are unintelligent, yet if you do learn it perfectly, you have washed your brain in their universe of racist ideas so first pickup the language.

Chapter – II: The Woman of Color and the White Man:

In this chapter Fanon used the term “Woman of color”, it refers to black woman and to understand problem of black woman. Fanon analyzed about one martini can woman and he observed that she loves white man and summit herself totally to him and she said “All I know is that he had blue eyes, blond hair, a pale complexion and I loved him”. By this, Fanon represents frighten Negro and he presents the two pole of the word or conflict of white and black.

The idea of white and black is about full of Narcissism and both – black and white cannot live without each other and Fanon further talks that when a white man marry with black woman it is acceptable but when a white woman marry a black man, she have to go away or she cannot get him or she will not accept him. Then again in this chapter Fanon deals with basic personality of people and he said that all of us born with some common structure like our family mean we all have a family that is common structure among all. So here Fanon tries to question this that basic personality is constant or a variable?  He tries to say that every black man have a desire of being white and he said that the black man cannot talk pleasure in his identity but for him there is only one to be happy that Leeds them white world. Here Fanon talks about behavior or mind or he is not historical. He said that Black required white approval or a colonized always need approval of dominant people. Then he said about attitude of black and white, then bad or negative attitude always go with black or positive or good thing goes with always behavior.

Then Fanon talked about mulatto that is a law Negro and also called color, he discussed the experience of being mulatto and said that when he crossed proposed the white woman; he crossed the line of being suppress. Then in this chapter he talks about a white man to the mulatto girl and when this news spread in the society, something happen if, there is a question in all’s minds that is it true? Or it should not be happen. Fanon tries to understand that what is the ambition of black woman is it to marry a white man? That said that something remarkable must have happened on the day when the white man declared his love to the mulatto but problem is that after wishing or marrying with white mulatto cannot forget that she is mulatto, at that time problem occurs. And this way she crossed many limits like historical than ethnological, sociological, political, economical factors, theological and then all this above become the reason for her inferior complex.

So conclusion of this chapter can be said that these woman look down on their own race and deep down wants to be white.

Chapter – III: The man of color and the white man:

In this chapter basically Fanon deals with two ideas that black man wants to be white because they have power and money, but in the contradictory black don’t like white so when this two feelings comes together at that time conflict occurs.

In this chapter Fanon further discussed about the neurotic problems or it can be negative or positive or he also talked about the feelings of rejection and he said that in this problem basically what happens is devaluation of self and he again said that problem is in you not outside. Neurotic not comes out from outside but grows in our self and then conflicts happen in within you or because of that you started reacting to influence and then come state of inner insecurity and all this happen with black.

So in the conclusion of this chapter it can be said that black man wants to be said that black man wants to be white too or at least prove they are equal to whites and here he talks about behavior white women that she will marry with uneducated white rather than an educated black.

Chapter – IV: The So-Called Dependency Complex of the Colonized                  

In this chapter Fanon read Mannoni - a writer of colonialism, he dismissed with Mannoni and said that he has no understanding what real colonialism is. According to Fanon, Mannoni look at only historical condition but he must be look at human attitudes also. Fanon here said that I cannot understand colonized with historical argue but it can be look with psychological point of view. Mannoni said that we born with inferiority complex and that it is not something like develop but it is something that is exists in society, but Fanon clear his point that it cannot be so, because either you can be black or you can be white. Only Mannoni believes that the concept of the poor whites of South Africa, for the Negro, has nothing to do with economic factor, now here Fanon said that no economic factor affects on black and then he gives the example of Jew, and Fanon said that it is because of basic racial structure.

So here he said about the idea of reorganization and said that the question of black and white is universal.

Chapter - IV: The Lived Experience of the Black Man:

In this chapter Fanon being with one sentence that is “Dirty Nigger!!” or simply “Look! A Negro!”. Now the two words that is “Dirty Nigger” or “A Negro” shows that they become object among other objects, here by this Fanon said that they became object only, than Fanon put a stress on then ontology does not allows us to understand the being of the black man, since it ignores the live experience for not only must the black man be black, he must be black in relation to the white man. Some people will argue that the situation has a double meaning but here Fanon said that it’s not so and said that the black man has no ontology resistance in the eyes of white man. He said that the black man is a toy in or object in the hands of the white man. Here again Fanon said that a black wanted to be while and it become joke for white and when black tried to claim their negritude intellectually as a concept, they snatched it away from them and in this way they proved to them that their reasoning was nothing but a phase in the dialectic.

In this chapter Fanon said that Black man always black, never fully human. No matter how much education they have or how they acts.

Chapter – VI: The Black Man and Psychology

Fanon here writes that why white people are so afraid of black men or black men are seen as being way less moral or white men fear they will take white men fear they will take white women from them and he give one example in the text that a normal black child having grown up with a normal family, will become abnormal at the slightest contact with the white world. He said about collective unconscious and asks that what do we see in the case of the black man? We can understand absolutely nothing. A drama is played out every day in the colonized countries. White also use blacks as scapegoats it is easier for them to imagine black as the screwed up ones intend the idea of black people as morally bad and white as morally pure.

In conclusion Fanon said that why white people fear black men parity it has to do with white men’s repressed homosexuality and their strange hang-ups about black men’s penises. More generally, black men are viewed as bodied makes them seems like mindless, violent, sexual, animal beings, add to that all the bad meanings that the word “Black” had even before Europeans set foot in Black Africa.

Chapter – IIV: The Black Man and Recognition:

In this chapter Fanon talks about reorganization function and he said that it is not that black is black and white is white but blackness created by white and whiteness is created by black so in this way recognition function he said that self consciousness exists in itself and for itself and I this way we are always concern about our own self but in real sense it is not so but its other who recognized you. There is not and open conflict white master recognized the Negro slave then he gives one example that white masters called black that you are useless and when black men believe in that then only reorganization happens. It mean here Fanon want to say that if is recognized you as human being you have to recognize me as a human being and Fanon was not a big believer of Adler and Hegel, but nonetheless he used their ideas as jumping off points to understand the black from his home island Martinique.

The conclusion of this chapter is how different shaped black people in America and Martinique styles of white rules.

Chapter – IIIV: By Way of Conclusion:

In the conclusion of the book, in last chapter he writes, Fanon does not want to be a black men, he wants to be a man, plain and simple. The trouble with blacks and whites is that both have become prisoners of their past and both have to move away from the inhuman voices of their respective ancestors so that a genuine communication can be born. He said why there is superiority? Or Inferiority? Why not simply try to touch the other?  Feel the other? Discover each other? Fanon is not much interested in black history, repetitions, making whites feel guilty or shouting his hatred at them. All those things are a relation against racism, still a prisoner of your past and your color. Fanon says he has only one right and one duty: The right to demand human behavior from the other, the duty to revert let his decisions renounce his freedom. So in conclusion he said that the social revolution cannot draw in poetry from the past but only from the future and one last prayer:

“O my body, always makes me a man, who questions!”

Dickens

Amita C. Jani
Roll no. : 11
SEM – II
Paper no : E-C-204
Year – 2011
Topic: Dickens

Submitted to Ms. Ruchira Dhudhrejiya
Department of English,
Bhavnagar University.

The life of Charles Dickens : 

One of the greatest British writers of all time, Charles Dickens was a Victorian novelist who chose the Bildungsroman form for at least two of his most famous works : David Copperfield (1849-1850) and Great Expectations (1860 – 1861). Born in Portsmouth, England, on February 7, 1812, Dickens grew up in London. His father was a navy clerk who went to debtors’ prison when Dickens was 12^th. Forced to go to work in a shoe dye factory, Dickens lived alone in fear and shame. These feeling led to the creation of his many orphan characters and his sympathy for the plight of the working class that made him the first great urban novelist. Although he was able to return to school and eventually clerked in a law firm, Dickens found his first success as a journalist and comic writer of the picalick papers (1836 – 1837). However, his deep social concerns found expression in a rich intensity and variety in his later works. By the time of his death from a paralytic stroke at age 58 on June 9, 1879, Dickens had written many novels, including a Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist and A Tale of Two Cities.  

Charles Dickens as an observer of the 19^th century English Society : 

Throughout his life Dickens was in interested in public affairs and although his popular reputation may have the progressive or racial quality of his thinking. His many works are against a number of official abuses and by the large was regarded as friend of the poor and a deny enemy to certain type of public servant. His novel belongs to the humanization movement of the Victorian era. He was from the first to last a novelist with a purpose in nearly all his novel, he set out to attack same specific abuse in the existence system of themes and throughout he constituted himself the weak, the outcast and the oprest. In his works there is an attack upon some legal of social evils of the Victorian society which Shakespeare had already hinted in his Hamlet.

He satires boding schools in Nicholas Nickelby, the court of chancery in Black house, the new manufacturing system and evils of industrialism in Hard times, the poor laws and work houses in Oliver Twist and he show money madness in great expectation system of teaching in David Copperfield.

In the 19^th century England, people were generally snobbish about their social condition. They felt that the country was working through fees of great prosperity. But the fact remains that the English society suffers from great economic inequality with only ten percent of total population leading comfortable of skilled, laboring servants, unskilled labors and migrating poor.  At a given time only 1/3 was fully employed, another 1/3 was only partially employed. In spite of such a grooving poverty, social consciousness gains a very slow response to the need of any change for the better. It is one of the great paradoxes of Victorian England. People could feel so unconcern about their poor and enjoy over their so called prosperity. Poor lost, free schools, work houses and public authorities came into existence. They were a inocary of social justice and the bumbles the manes could reduced any social system, however considered it might be to a force. Dickens attempts to show order the need of changing the social order and winding its concerns to include in it. The well for those whose were really poor and deprived. Oliver Twist the novel opens with bitter poor laws of 19^th century. These laws were a destroyed manifestation of the Victorian middle classes emphasis on the hard work. England in 1830 was rapidly undergoing a transformation in all the works of life. The growing middle class had achieved an economic influence equal to if not greater than that of the British aristocracy. 

Dickens as an observer : 

Oliver Twist was Dickens’ second novel however in Dickens the reformatory instinct was very strong and in the very next novel his readers were surprised to see him ruthlessly attacking the social evils, in particular the wretched conditions in the work house. In his later novels he carried on a crusade against other evils like the miserable conditions in the debtors’ prisons in the factories and shops, the corruption prevalent in the election system and certain other evils caused by the rapid industrialization of the country. In order to understand these novels including Oliver Twist it is important to have a fair idea of the historical background in which they written. 

Poor laws : 

The first few chapters of Oliver Twist are a very strong protest against the work house life that virtually dehumanized human beings. Certain systems that had been initiated to being relief to the poor people had gradually been so corrupted that instead of giving them any solace, they had actually made their life miserable. It was under Queen Elizabeth-I that laws were made to provide relief to those poor people who could not support themselves. There was a two-fold arrangement. The old, the sick, the lame and the blind were reviled at home; orphans were boarded out and then apprenticed to a trade. The vagabonds were sent to the houses of correction. The theory behind this arrangement was to provide work to the able bodied poor and to offer relief to the disabled… special buildings were set up to provide work to the poor people under supervision. These building were known as work houses. By an act passed in 1722, the poor could be compelled to live and work on these buildings in order to be eligible to get relief. In other words, either a poor man was to live in the work house or he was to be denied any relief. This was known as the workhouse test. At first there was separate institution for the different needs of children, old people or those who were mentally or physically sick. But gradually the workhouse condition deteriorated; workhouse came to contain a mixture of able and disabled like end by the end of 19^th century, they became symbols of utter degradation. In most workhouse husband were separated from wives, children lacked proper care, diseases were rife and food was inadequate. 

In the late 18^th century laws passed to allow “out-door relief” to the able-bodied so that that workhouse could only the old or disabled. The original plan was to offer minimum wage for he labors, but later a system known as “Speenhamland System” was devised. Accordingly to it relief based on the current prices of bread was given in addition to wages. Once again the intention was to make the life of the poor people worth living, but in practice it lead to general weakening of the independence and self respect of labors and an increase of pauperism in the long run. In the early 19^th century therefore the need was felt to effect reforms in the poor laws. It was felt that a more suitable alternative solution was needed which had become both wasteful and corrupt. Besides, the system of administering relief also needed to be over-hauled. 

The administration of relief :

At this stage, it would be useful to make a note of the system of administering relief to the poor. Basically it was the responsibility of parish which was the main unit of local government in ruling it. Apart from other officials, the parish had the “Justice of Peace” whose duty was to impose the compulsory rates “the poor rate” and to appoint local overseers to administer actual relief. Another petty official was the beadle. Originally it is main function was to proclaim meeting. But he was also expected to keep order in church and to punish petty offenders. Gradually the beadle came to yield considerable power on a small scale. In Oliver Twist there is one such beadle, Mr. Bumble.

Most of the parish officials were unfit for their jobs because of their own lack of education, experience or responsibility. Their positions were both unpaid and compulsory. Therefore it was rarely that really good people ever got elected to them. 

Poor law reforms : 

In 1832 a commission was appointed to study the entire issue of the poor law reform. On the basis of the proposals put forward by this commission, the new poor law of 1834 came into being. Accordingly to it a central authority was created, the poor law commissions, who were given full powers to control local administration. One of the most important changes made by the new poor laws was the replacement of parish officers by elected local bodies known as Board of Guardians. These boards were required to supervise petty officials such as the matron of the workhouse. We find one such Board in Oliver Twist in chapter-II. 

The inefficiency of the reforms : 

There is no doubt that the 1834 measure were excellent in intention, nevertheless even they faild to prove effective. The poor people continued to suffer. However human might be the laws, in which can ultimately bring any benefits. A corrupt administration will make a mockery of the best possible laws. Therefore Dickens has directed his criticism as much against the individuals. If he is critical of the system that degraded human beings, he is equally critical of the people who were responsible for evolving or running such a system. 

In Oliver Twist we find that the workhouse in charge, Mrs. Mann, appropriate the greater part of the stipend given for the food of the children and the children are mostly starved. Here it is Mrs. Mann who is at fault. 

It should be noted that Dickens’ main concern was the individual as an integral part of the system. A system without human beings would be lifeless and even meaningless. Human being without a system would be tending to be confused. So Dickens felt the need of basically good human beings working under a system that was designed to serve the society of these two also, her gave greater importance to human beings. It is Mr. Brownlow as an individual who ultimately rescues Oliver from his system. Laws were bad, in fact Mr. Bumble’s judgment, “Law is a ass – a idiot”, is quite justified. The underworld where people like Fagin ruled was also a dark world but noble people like Mr. Brownlow and the Mayflies could rise these systems and do some good to the society. 

Therefore Dickens makes a very selective criticism in Oliver Twist. He attacks the harsh regime of the workhouse with special regard to diet and utter neglect of the needs of the pauper children but more than that inefficiency and in humanity of such officials as Mr. Bumble and Mrs. Corney. These officials not only physically starved the children but often made them emotional wrecks. 

There has been a good deal of discussion among scholars as to whether Dickens ways attacking the old poor laws of the new. Nut this discussions is almost irrelevant. We should remember that the novel is more an attack on the way the laws are administrated rather than on the intention of the lows on paper most of the lows are just spoken. This only in practice that they prove to be injurious as K.J. Fielding points out, the novel was never intended as an attack on mere institutions, but on the spirit behind them, which remains largely unchanged. 

It is hard to say if any reforms were really carried out as a result of Dicken’s attack on these laws. In fact the protests made by writers are never so quickly effective. But one thing is certain: this novel as well as others to follow definitely prepared a climate in which a genuine need was felt to have a second look at the entire administrative set up and to change it. 

The police system : 

There seems to be an indirect satire on the incompetence and ineffectiveness of the police system, for there are Fagin and Sikes operating right under the shadow of the police and they seem to enjoy perfect immunity. 

Conclusion : 

While writing Oliver Twist, Dickens had the awareness of the entire 19^th century in his mind and some of he scenes mentioned above carry and unmistakable stamp of that time. But the sole purpose of writing the novel Oliver Twist is to create social awareness of the evils present in the contemporary society.