Assignment of paper no 8

Name : Divya d. Vaghela
Sem :2
Batch : 2018-20
Roll no :07
Email-ID : Vaghela.divya230@gmail.com
Paper no :08
Subject : The cultural studies
Topic : 1) Identity
             2) Everyday

    Words :  1857


Introduction :

#   what is cultural studies?
Cultural studies is one of the more controversial intellectual formations of the 1990s and the first decade of the third millennium. It has experienced a period of rapid growth in the academy, appearing at many universities in a variety of forms and locations (although rarely as degree-granting departments). At the same time, it has been broadly attacked both from inside the university and outside academia.Because the word " culture " itself is so difficult to pin down," cultural studies " is hard to define.  As was also the case in chapter -8 with Elaine Showalter's " cultural " model of feminine differences, " cultural studies " is not do much a discrete approach at all, but rather a set of practices. As Patrick Brantlinger has pointed out, cultural studies is not " a tightly coherent, unified movement with a fixed agenda, " but a " loosely coherent group of tendencies, issues and questions ". The discipline of psychology has also entered the field of cultural studies. For example, Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious structured as a language promoted emphasis upon language and power as symbolic systems. From Michael Foucault came the notion that power is a whole complex of forces; it is that which produces what happens.

Over the last thirty years, cultural studies has developed into a diverse and lively international intellectual field. As Stuart Hall, one of its founders, has put it: " Today, cultural studies programmes exist everywhere, especially in the United States.....  Where they have come to provide  a focal point for interdisciplinary studies and research, and for the development of critical theory. The institutional success of cultural studies is demonstrated by a number of major international journals, global and national associations, increasing numbers of international conferences, academic programmes and publishers catalogues advertising new and essential publications in the field. As a field of study, cultural studies has had important effects on the study of literature. It has challenged the idea of canonical literature, and affected the way literary texts are theorized and read.  It has introduced cross and interdisciplinary perspectives. It has sought to theorized  the role of literature in society in new ways and to look at literary texts in relation to cultural institutions, cultural history and other cultural texts, forms and Practies.  It has further focused attention on the circuit of literary production.

So, now let's talk about Identity..............

        ~   Identity :
• The identity of a person is, for cultural studies, dependent upon the roles played by that per person, the signs that designates that person. Identity is constituted through experience and representation is a significant part of experience.Experience includes the consumption of signs, the making of meaning from signs and the knowledge of meaning. However, cultural studies believes that experience also masks the connections between different structures in society. We do not always understand that we are not in control of our lives, and that we are subject to ideogical control. That is, experience often makes us believe that we are free agents, when we are in reality victims of discursive and ideological regimes that treat us as consumers alone. We do not always have the power of choice - that is in itself an illusion generated through representation. As we have seen, these signs are part of a discourse. Therefore, it follows that girls assimilate qualities of the ' feminine ' because they are brought up within the discourse of femininity. The culture's values inculcate notions of ' femininity'and ' masculinity ' in the children, where the roles they will play are clearly demarcated from childhood ( care, nature, home for girls, to continue with the above example). As adults the relation between the genders is therefore already set : women will be in charge of the home. The discourse of femininity therefore determines the power and spatial relations between genders. Identity is the consequences of representation and the effect of discourse.

• Identity is based on the location within a system of relationships and discourses. Identity is thus socially produced. Closely related to the theme of identity in cultural status the question of agency. Agency - the capacity and power to determine one's actions and life - is also socially produced.An individual's ability to act is limited by the contexts in which s/he lives.  For cultural studies this is a key debate. Who are the empowered agents in any culture. Who determines the limits of an individual's freedoms?  What are the consequences of an individual's actions unanticipated culture. Proceeding from our discussion of identity and representation we are now in a position to explore the relations between these two and agency.

Representation is the generation of meaning and constitutes identity. Identity determines the degree of agency one possesses or does not possess. Agency is therefore the consequences of representation too. What follows from this is a crucial point. Discourses and representations determine an individual's identity, agency and actions. Discourses, as we have seen, are structurestof power they generate particular meanings/ identities. In any culture therefore, it is crucial to see which classes / groups control the discourses that have such powers of determining identities and agency. In other words, we need to analyze structures of power that influence images, representation and meaning because these structures finally determine individual lives and actions.

¤ Every day Life..........
        Contemporary cultural studies takes everyday life very seriously. Everyday life, especially in metropolises - and, unfortunately, cultural studies seems to be interested mainly in metropolitan cultures - is a site that is multi - layered and contested. Everyday life is about the practices of the routine. It is about.....
                 • Life
                 • consumption
                 • Social interactions / relations

The ' culrural ' is constituted by and constitutes the ' social'. That is, the social realm - Society - is constituted by the ' cultural'artefacts used by the people, even as the cultural artefacts are themselves produced and consumed by society. Cultural artefacts in the social realm can be studied through the analysis of everyday life. What is crucial is that is that Cultural Studies analysing everyday life accounts for subjectivity in the people's responses, since experience is subjective. Sociological studies have often ignored the fact that people respond emotionally to things, and this is a central part of their identity.

A caution : Everyday life is specific to locations and cultures. Everyday life in Manhattan, Newyork, is not the same as everyday life in Bangalore or Guwahati. Think of the differences in basic structures of everyday life in the cities - massive public transport infrastructure, no power cuts, to mention just two - and you can see that we need to ask different kinds of questions about what kinds of clothes people need to wear or whether you can eat on the move on a public transport facility. Thus cultural artefacts /events of food or fashion are structured differently for different locations - and cultural studies is be conscious of this.

Experience is the cornerstone of everyday life. Experience is everyday life - how we experience traffic, clothing, food, social relations on public transport, the sense of community or entertainment  constitute our everyday culture. Cultural studies foregrounds experience, but sees it as the means to analyse the relations that construct reality. In order to make this shift from experience to reality (by which cultural studies means the class, geography, community, ideologies and discourses that constitute our reality - see the chapter on Theories to understand how discourses construct reality)  , cultural studies underscores the textual/ linguistic aspect of experience. Experience is expressed through language : how we express what we experience, how we speak with others and how we tell our stories. When we listen to others we decide their meanings, we mediate their experience through the language and cultural codes they and we share. Language and representation are therefore integral to the experience and construction to reality. If experience and everyday life are central to culture, then it is important to see how these experiences of the everyday become languages, images and representations.

Cultural studies interest in everyday life proceeds from what Raymond Williams (1981) called ' lived cultures ' ,where culture is produced through everyday living : the food people eat, the fashions they adopt, the entertainment they prefer or the festivals they celebrate. Cultural studies thus believes that people leading their everyday lives produce culture. Culture is not some distinct realm produced elsewhere to be consumed by the people. It is in the everyday that culture is made. Cultural Studies investigates this process of making culture. This process, it believes, is linked to relationships of power. Everyday life is a place where the individual becomes central. The individual's subjectivity is therefore a crucial element  of the cultural studies of everyday life. What is important, as we shall see, is that the individual in contemporary globalized culture is an active agent. The individuals are very aware of their appropriation of global cultures, often transforming the global in their own,native contexts.

Cultural studies brings to everyday life the same tools of analysis one finds in literary study. Advertisements, popular songs, television shows, journalism, gaming - all can be analyzed from a variety of critical perspectives. That is the case because they are imaginative artifacts that bear meaning. They are constructed using techniques similar to those used in film and literature such as narrative, metaphor, irony, framing, and composition. Everyday life today is a hybrid of the local and the global.  No pure local culture exists in metropolises any more : even where local ethnic chic is marketed it is part of a global consumer market. Hence everyday life gives us multiple identities, a melange. Everyday life is a site of struggle over meaning. It generates multiple identities. If the local was homogeneous, the global is heterogeneous. Contemporary everyday life is a mix of the two, where it is difficult to see where the local culture /value ends and the global one begins. Thus both homogenization and heterogenization are central to metropolitan everyday lives today. This mix of the local and the global has been termed the ' golcal'. Everyday life in cultural studies is a fragmented, multiple space where meanings are hybridized and contested. That is,cities and identities that were once more or less homogeneous in terms of ethnic identities and patterns of consumption are now completely hybrid.

       Thus, what cultural studies reminds is a very simple truth : we cannot say that everyday life is dominated or taken over by global cultures. Everyday life is fiercely contested where the meanings of global cultural artefacts are re- invented, re- inscribed by native cultures. The consumer is not a passive recipient of global cultural iconstor artefacts. S/ he modifies what S/he receives to suit her/his own purposes  and engages with the global cultures in a native way, often productively re -doing the global to fit in with an Indian cultural system.


Thank you......................... 

Assignment of paper no 7

Name : Divya D. Vaghela
Batch 2018-20
Roll no : 07
Email ID : Vaghela.divya230@gmail.com
Enrollment no: 2069108420190044
Paper no : 07
Subject : Literary Theory & criticism : The 20th  Western & Indian Poetics -2.
Topic : Literary Terms
           1. Structuralism
           2. Poststructralism
Words : 2040
Submitted to : MKBU Department of English .


What is Structuralism?

" structuralism as a concept is grand, controversial and elusive.For our purposes it is to be understood at two levels of generality : first, as a broad intellectual movement, one of the most significant ways of theorizing in the human sciences in the twentieth century;  second, as a Particular set of approaches to literature (and other arts and aspects of culture)  flourishing especially in France in the 1960s but with older roots and continuing repercussions. The basic premiss of structuralism is that human activity and its products, even perception and thought itself, are constructed and not natural. Structure is the principle of construction and the object of analysis, to be understood by its intimate references to  the concepts System and value as defined in SEMIOTICS...... Structuralist students of literature linked semiotics assumptions with ideas from other sources, principally Russian FORMALISM;  Prague school Structuralism....;  the narrative analysis of Vladimir propp;  structuralist anthropology as blended from linguistics of Chomsky.....  More successful has been the analysis of narrative structure. The inspiration came from Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folk -Tale (1928) ,which apperead in French translation in 1957 and in English in 1958. Propp noted that, though the individual characters in Russian tales were very diverse, their functions could be described in a limited number of terms ( he suggested thirty -one, falling into seven superordinate categories).  By reference to these elements, the narrative ordering of any tale could be recognized as a sequence of functions of the dramatis personae and associated actions. This is in fact a generative grammar of narrative : a finite system of abstract units generates an infinite set of narrative sequences. The linguistic analogy was seized on by Levi -Strauss...  It became a standard assumption in narratology that the structure of a story was homologous with the structure of a sentence; this assumption allowed the apparatus of sentence - linguistics to be applied to the development of aetalanguage for describing narrative structure.... Anglo -saxon reaction to structuralism has been almost universally hostile, deploring its mechanistic and reductive style and suspecting its exponents of a kind of left -wing philistinism. Fortunately, the Response in France has been more subtle and more positively critical, confronting problems of what is neglected in the structuralist approach : reader, author, discourse as communicative practice and as ideot"

" structuralism rose to prominence in France through the application by the French anthropologist, Claude Levi-strauss, of Saussurian structural linguistics to the study of such phenomena as myths, rituals, kinship relations ,eating conversations.... Literature seemed especially appropriate to a structuralist approach as it was wholly made up of language "." structuralism is bound up with the general movement away from positivism, ' historicizing history ' and the ' biographical illusion ' ,a movement represented in various ways by the critical writings of a Proust;  an Eliot, a Valery, Russian Formalism, French thematic criticism or Anglo - American New Criticism...  Structuralism, then, would appear to be a refuge for all immanent criticism against the danger of fragmentation that threatens thematic analysis : the means of reconstituting the unit of a work, its principle of coherence.... Structural criticism is untainted by any of the transcendent reductions of psychoanalysis, for example, or Marxist explanation, but it exerts, in its own way, a sort of internal reduction, traversing the substance of the work in order to reach its bone -structure : certainly not a superficial examination, but a sort of radioscopic penetration, and all the more external in that it is more penetrating ".



What is structuralism?  How is it applied to the study of literature?


      Structuralism : it is the offshoot of certain developments in linguistics and anthropology. Saussure's mode of the synchronic study of language was an attempt to formulate the grammar of a language from a study of parole.Using the Saussurian linguistic model, Claude Levi-strauss examined the customs and conventions of some cultures  with a view of arriving at the grammar of those cultures. Structuralist criticism aims at forming a Poetics or the science of literature from a study of literary works. It takes for granted ' the death of the author ' ; hence it looks upon works as self - organized linguistic structures. The best work in structuralist Poetics has been done in the field of narrative.

        In literary theory, Structuralism is an approach to analyzing the narrative material by examining the underlying in variant structure. For example, a literary critic applying a structuralist literary theory might say that the authors of West side story did not write anything " really " new, because their work has the same structure as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. In both  texts a girl and a boy fall in love ( a "formula" with a symbolic operator between them would be " Boy + Girl " ) despite the fact that they belong to two groups that hate each other ("Boy's Group - Girl's Group " or " opposing forces " ) and conflict is resolved by their death. The versatility of structuralism is such that a literary critic could make the same claim about a story of two friendly families ( Boy's Family + Girl's Family " ) that arrange a marriage between their children despite the fact that the children hate each other ("Boy  - Girl " ) and then the children commit suicide to escape the arranged marriage;  the justification is that the second story's structure is an ' inversion ' Of the first story's struct: the relationship between the values of love and the Two pairs parties involved have been reversed.

Gerard Genette and Structuralistict criticism :

Gerard Gebetter writes at the outset in his essay ' Structuralism and Literary Criticism ' that methods developed for the study of the one discipline could be satisfactorily applied to the study of other discipline as well. This is what he calls " intellectual bricolage ",borrowing a  term from Claude Levi-strauss, This is a precisely so, so far as Structuralism is concerned. Structuralism is the name given to Saussure's approach to language as system of relationships. But it is applied also to the study of philosophy, literature and other sciences of humanity. Literary  criticism in that it is meta - linguistic in character and comes into being / existence as metaliterature. In his words : " it can therefore be metaliterature, that is to say, ' a literature of which literature is the imposed object ".That is, it is literature written to explain literature and language used in it to explain the role of language in literature.
In Genette's words, ' if the writer questions the universe, the critic questions literature, that is to say, the Universe of signs. But what was a sign for the writer becomes  meaning for the critic and in another way what was meaning for the writer becomes a sign for the critic, as the theme and symbol of a certain literary nature ' . Now this being so, there is certain room for reader's interpretation. Levi -Strauss is quite right when he says that the critic always puts something of himself into the works he read.


The Structralist Method of Criticism :

     Literature, being a primarily a work of language, and structuralism in its part.being preeminetly a linguistic method, the most probable encounter should obviously take place on the terrain of linguistic material. Sound, forms, words and sentences constitute the common object of the Linguist and the philologist to much an extent that it was possible, in the early Russian Formalist movement, to define literature as a mere dialect, and to envisage its study as an annex of general dialectology. Traditional criticism regards criticism as message without code;  Russian Formalism regards literature as code without message. Structuralism by structural analysis makes it possible to uncover the connection that exists between a system of forms and a system of meanings, by replacing the search for term by term analysis with one for over all homologies. Meaning is yielded by the structural relationship within a given work, it is not introduced from outside. Genette believed that the structural Study of ' poetic language ' and of the forms of literary expression cannot reject the analysis of the relations between Code and message. The ambition of Structuralism is not confined to counting feet an stomach observe the repetition of phonemes : it must also study semantic phenomena which constitute the essence of poetic  language. It is in this reference that Genette's writes : " one of the newest and most fruitful directions that are now opening up for literary research ought to be the structural study of the  'large unities ' of discourse, beyond the framework - which linguistics in the strict sense cannot cross - of the sentence ." one would thus study systems from a much higher level of generality, such as narrative, description and the other major forms of literary expression. There would be linguistics of discourse that was a translinguisticst.
Genette empathetically defines Structuralism as a method is based on the study of Structures wherever they occur. He further adds, " But to begin with, Structures are not directly encountered  objects - far from it : they are systems of latent relations, conceived rather than than perceived, which analysis constructs as it uncovers them ,and which it runs the risk of inventing while believing that it is discovering them. " Furthermore, structuralism is not a method;  it is also with Ernest Cassirer calls a ' general tendency of thought ' or as others would say an ideology, the prejudice of which is precisely to value structures at the expense of substances.
     
    Genette is of the view that any analysis that confines itself to a work without considering its sources of motives would be implicitly structuralist, and  the structural method ought to intervene in order to give this immanent study  a sort of rationality of understanding that would replace the rationality of explanation abandoned with the search of causes. Unlike Russian Formalist, Structuralists like Genette gave importance to thematic study also. " Thematic analysis " ,writes Genette, " would tend spontaneously to culminate and to  be tested in a structural synthesis in which the different themes are grouped in networks, in order to extract their full meaning from their place and function In the system of the work. " Thus, Structuralism would appear to be a refuge for all immanent criticism against the danger of fragmentation that threatens thematic analysis.

Genette believed that structural criticism is  untainted by any of the transcendent reductions of psychoanalysis or Marxist explanation. He further writes, " It exerts, in its own way, a sort of internal reduction, traversing the substance of the work in order to reach its bone-Structure : certainly not a superficial examination, but a sort of radioscopict penetration, and all the more external in that it is more penetrating. "

 Genette observes relationship between structuralism and hermeneutics also. He writes : " thus the relation that binds Structuralism and hermeneutics together might not be one of mechanical separation and exclusion, but of complementarity : on the subject of the same work. hermeneutic criticism might speak the language of the assumption of meaning and of internal recreation, and structural criticism that of distant speech and intelligible reconstruction. " They would, thus, bring out complementary significations, and their dialogue would be all the more fruitful.


Conclusion :
  Thus to conclude we may say, the Structralist idea is to follow literature in its overall evolution, while making synchronic cuts at various stages and comparing the tables one with another. Literary evolution then appears in all its richness, which derives from the fact that the system survives while constantly altering. In this sense literary history becomes the history of a system : it is the evolution of the functions that it significant, not that of the elements, and knowledge of the synchronic relations necessarily precedes that of the processes.

Thank you. .... 

Assignment of paper no 6 Robert Browning as a study of poet

Name : Divya D. Vaghela
Sem :02
Roll no :07
Batch :2018-20
Email ID : Vaghela.divya230@gmail.com
Paper no :06
Subject : The Victorian Literature
Topic :   Robert Browning ; The study of a poet.
Words : 2280
Submitted to : MKBU Department of English


Introduction :

The Victorian Age :
 #      The period of 1820 to 1900 known as the age of ‘victoria’. During this period Queen Victoria developed the much literary forms. So, this age in English literature known as the ‘Victorian Age’. During that period many great writers gave their best contribution to English age as a gift. , Browning, Dickens, Thackray, Meredith, Carlyle, Macaulay and Ruskin there are some great stars of the age. Tennyson the prominent poet of the age. So, now let’s we discussing about Tennyson in detailed. Lord Alfred Tennyson was born in 1809.The son of a clergyman he was born at his father’s living at Somersby in Lincolnshire. After some schooling at Louth, This was not agreeable to him. He was taken education from the Cambridge.  University, at the university he was a wholly conventional person.
            #   We can also say about this period that The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 1837 until her death in 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined culture, great advancements in technology, and national self-confidence for Britain.  During the Victorian age, Britain was the world's most powerful nation. By the end of Victoria's reign, Victorian England saw great expansion of wealth, power, and culture. it was also a time of misery, squalor, and urban ugliness And we are going to discuss about two major poet who create a kind of influence in this era.
  # While in the preceding Romantic period, poetry had been the dominant genre, it was the novel that was most important in the Victorian period. Charles Dickens (1812–1870) dominated the first part of Victoria's reign: his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, was published in 1836, and his last Our Mutual Friend between 1864–5. William Thackeray's (1811–1863) most famous work Vanity Fair appeared in 1848, and the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte (1816–55), Emily (1818–48) and Anne (1820–49), also published significant works in the 1840s. A major later novel was George Eliot's (1819–80) Middlemarch (1872), while the major novelist of the later part of Queen Victoria's reign was Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), whose first novel, Under the Greenwood Tree, appeared in 1872 and his last, Jude the Obscure, in 1895.
 ~   Robert Browning (1812–89) and Alfred Tennyson (1809–92) were Victorian England's most famous poets, though more recent taste has tended to prefer the poetry of Thomas Hardy, who, though he wrote poetry throughout his life, did not publish a collection until 1898, as well as that of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89), whose poetry was published posthumously in 1918. Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) is also considered an important literary figure of the period, especially his poems and critical writings. Early poetry of W. B. Yeats was also published in Victoria's reign. With regard to the theatre it was not until the last decades of the nineteenth century that any significant works were produced. This began with Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operas, from the 1870s, various plays of George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) in the 1890s, and Oscar Wilde's (1854–1900) The Importance of Being Earnest.

The influence of Victorian Age :
     Writers from the United States and the British colonies of Australia, New Zealand and Canada were influenced by the literature of Britain and are often classed as a part of Victorian literature, although they were gradually developing their own distinctive voices.[8] Victorian writers of Canadian literature include Grant Allen, Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill. Australian literature has the poets Adam Lindsay Gordon and Banjo Paterson, who wrote Waltzing Matilda, and New Zealand literature includes Thomas Bracken and Frederick Edward Maning. From the sphere of literature of the United States during this time are some of the country's greats including: Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Henry James, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman.

The problem with the classification of "Victorian literature" is the great difference between the early works of the period and the later works which had more in common with the writers of the Edwardian period and many writers straddle this divide. People such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard, Jerome K. Jerome and Joseph Conrad all wrote some of their important works during Victoria's reign but the sensibility of their writing is frequently regarded as Edwardian.
       
In the year 1837, Queen Victoria ascended the throne of Great Britain and Ireland and succeeded William the IV. She served for a period of 64 years, till her death in 1901 and it is one of the longest reigns in the history of England. The period was marked by many important social and historical changes that altered the nation in many ways. The population nearly doubled, the British Empire expanded exponentially and technological and industrial progress helped Britain become the most powerful country in the world.

Chief Characteristics of Victorian Period :
While the country saw economic progress, poverty and exploitation were also equally a part of it. The gap between the rich and the poor increased significantly and the drive for material and commercial success was seen to propagate a kind of a moral decay in the society itself. The changing landscape of the country was another concern. While the earlier phase of Romanticism saw a celebration of the country side and the rich landscape of the flora and fauna, the Victorian era saw a changing of the landscape to one of burgeoning industries and factories. While the poor were exploited for their labor, the period witnessed the rise of the bourgeoisie or the middle class due to increasing trade between Britain and its colonies and the Reform Bill of 1832 strengthen their hold. There was also a shift from the Romantic ideals of the previous age towards a more realistic acceptance and depiction of society.

One of the most important factors that defined the age was its stress on morality. Strict societal codes were enforced and certain activities were openly looked down upon. These codes were even harsher for women. A feminine code of conduct was levied on them which described every aspect of their being from the proper apparels to how to converse, everything had rules. The role of women was mostly that of being angels of the house and restricted to domestic confines. Professionally very few options were available to them as a woman could either become a governess or a teacher in rich households. Hence they were financially dependent on their husbands and fathers and it led to a commercialization of the institution of marriage.

Literary Trends of the Victorian novel :

• Lose plots (fielding's tradition of writing novel) 
• A mixture of strength and weakness
• Entertainment  value
• Panoramic value
• Immense variety
• Imaginative rendering of reality
• Humour
• Characterization
• Lack of high artistic standard

Robert Browning :
         Robert Browning (1812 –1889) was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets. Browning was famous for his dramatic monologues and commentary on social institutions. He was married to Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning.  He truly observer of Renaissance period and he admire for it. The Renaissance saw a major shift in theories of art. As “Fra Lippo Lippi” discusses, a new realism, based on observation and detail, was coming to be valued, while traditional, more abstract and more didactic forms of art were losing favor. This shifting in priorities is analogous to the shifting views on art and morality in Browning’s time. The Renaissance, like the Victorian era, was also a time of increasing secularism  and concentration of wealth and power. All of these aspects make the Renaissance and the Victorian era rather similar. By talking about the Renaissance, Browning can make his cultural criticism somewhat less biting
           I also want to say that Browning aspires to redefine the aesthetic, the rough language of his poems often matches the personalities of his speakers “My Last Duchess,” for example, and uses rhymed couplets. The disjunction between form and content or form and language suggests some of the conflict being described in the poems, whether the conflict is between two moral contentions or is a conflict between aesthetics and ethics as systems. Browning’s rough meters and unpoetic language test a new range for the aesthetic.

  How good is man's life, the mere living ! how fit to employ
   All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy  !

     In this new song of David, from Browning's Saul, we have a suggestion of the astonishing vigor and hope that characterize all the works of Browning, the one poet of the age who, after thirty years of continuous work, was finally recognized and placed beside Tennyson, and whom future ages may judge to be a greater poet, - perhaps, even, the greatest in our literature since Shakespeare .
      The chief difficulty in reading Browning's is the obscurity of his style, which the critics of half a century ago held up to ridicule. Their attitude towards the poet's early work may be inferred from Tennyson's humorous criticism of sordello. It may be remembered that the first line of this obscure poem is, " who will may hear sordello's story told " ; and that the last line is, " who would has heard sordello's story told. " Tennyson remarked that he understood, and that they were evidently both lies.  If we attempt to explain this obscurity, which puzzled Tennyson and many less friendly critics, we find that it has many sources. First, the poet's thought is often obscure, or else so extremely subtle that language expresses it imperfectly, -
           Thoughts hardly to be packed
           Into a narrow act,
          Fancies that broke through language and escaped.

  Second, Browning is led from one thing to another by his own mental associations, and forgets that the Reader's associations may be of an entirely different kind. Third, Browning is careless in his English, and frequently clips his speech, giving us a series of ejaculations. As we do not quite understand his processes of thought, we must stop between the ejaculations to trace out the connections. Fourth, Browning's allusions are often far -fetched, refer -ring to some odd scrap of information which he has picked up in his wide reading, and the ordinary reader finds it difficult to trace and understand them. Finally, Browning wrote too much and revised too little. The time which he should have given to making one thought clear was used in expressing other thoughts that fitted through his head like a flock of swallows. His field was the individual soul, never exactly alike in any two men, and he sought to express the hidden motives and principles which govern individual action. In this field he is like a miner delving underground, sending up masses of mingled earth and ore;  and the reader must sift all this material to separate the gold from the dross.

     Here, certainly, are sufficient reasons for Browning's obscurity;  and we must add the word that the fault seems unpardot, for the simple reason that Browning shows himself capable, at times, of writing directly, melodiously, and with noble simplicity.
       He is not, like so many others, an entertaining poet. One cannot read him after dinner, or when settled in a comfortable easy chair. One must sit up, and think, and be alert when he reads Browning. If we accept these conditions, we shall probably find that Browning is the most stimulating port in our language. His influence upon our life is positive and tremendous. His strength, his joy of life, his robust faith, and his invincible optimism enter into us, making us different and better men after reading him. And perhaps the best thing we can say of Browning is that his thought is slowly but surely taking possession of all well- educated men and women.
     



His major works :
     •      Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession (1833)
            Paracelsus
           Strafford (play) (1837)
           Sordello (1840)
            Bells and Pomegranates No. I: Pippa Passes (play) (1841)
           Bells and Pomegranates No. II: King Victor and King Charles
            (play) (1842)
          Bells and Pomegranates No. III: Dramatic Lyrics (1842)
         Porphyria's Lover
          Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister
          My Last Duchess
        The Pied Piper of Hamelin
        Count Gismond
      Johannes Agricola in Meditation

   Here I want to put few lines of his work,

“One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, tho’ right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are buffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.
                                    ~ Epilogue, Browning

In 1834 he accompanied the Chevalier George de Benkhausen, the Russian consul-general, on a brief visit to St Petersburg and began Paracelsus, which was published in 1835. Browning's reputation began to make a partial recovery with the publication, 1841–1846, of Bells and Pomegranates, a series of eight pamphlets, originally intended just to include his plays. Fortunately his publisher, Moxon, persuaded him to include some "dramatic lyrics", some of which had already appeared in periodicals.


Conclusion:

     In short , I just want to say that Victorian period is also a promoted through the English development and it’s connect their roots with Renaissance time. Tennyson & Browning both are distinguish poet that given their much contribution in literature  writing in this era.


Thank you.......... 

Assignment of paper no 5 The Romantic literature

Name : Divya d. Vaghela
Sem :02
Batch 2018-20
Roll no :07
Enrollment no : 2069108420190044
Email ID : Vaghela.divya230@gmail.com
Paper no :05
Subject :  The Romantic Literature.
Topic :Characteristics of the  Romantic age and Wordsworth as a Romantic poet.
Submitted to : MKBU Department  of English.
Words : 2050

• Romanticism :


Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. Various dates are given for the Romantic period but here the publishing of William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads in 1798 is taken as the beginning, and the crowning of Queen Victoria in 1837 as its end.Romanticism arrived later in other parts of the English-speaking world, such as America.

The Romantic period was one of major social change in England, because of the depopulation of the countryside and the rapid development of overcrowded industrial cities, that took place in the period roughly between 1798 and 1832. The movement of so many people in England was the result of two forces: the Agricultural Revolution, that involved the enclosure of the land, drove workers off the land, and the Industrial Revolution which provided them employment, "in the factories and mills, operated by machines driven by steam-power". Indeed, Romanticism may be seen in part as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, though it was also a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, as well as a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature. The French Revolution was an especially important influence on the political thinking of many at this time.

  While Dryden, Pope, and Johnson were successively the of English letters and while under their leadership, the heroic couplet became the fashion for poetry and literature in general became satiric or critical in spirit and formal in expression, a New Romantic movement quietly made it’s appearance. Thomson’s  ‘The Seasons’ (1730) was the first noteworthy poem of the romantic revival and the poems and the poets increased steadily in number and importance till in the age of Wordsworth and Scott. The spirit of romanticism dominated our literature more completely than classicism had ever done. This Romantic movement which Victor Hugo calls “ Liferalism in Literature ”  is simply the Expression of life as seen by imagination rather by prosail ‘common sense’ in the 18th century.

The Age of Romanticism is known as the second creative period of English Literature. This Age produced many great poets like William Wordsworth, S.T.Colerdige, Lord Byron, P.B.Shelley, John Keats, and many more.

The characteristic of Romantic Age :

● Reaction against Neo - Classicism :

 Romantic Poetry is different from Neo Classical Poetry. In Neo classical Poetry is based on the reason and intellectual while Romantic Poetry. Which begins in 18th century. It was reaction against set standard of poetry of classical age. According to William. J.Long :

 " The Romantic movement was marked and it is always marked by a strong reaction and Protestant against the bondage of rule and custom which in science and theology as well as literature generally tend to fetter the free human spirit."

So Romantic Poetry is come after the Romantic movement and this movement become the way of new poetry which is free from classical Poetry and it's rules and regulations later on it called as " Romantic Poetry ".
● Imagination :
 Imagination is main and important element of Romantic Poetry. In  Classical Age there is important of Reason but in Romantic Poetry there is important of imagination. Classical writers believed in Reason but Romantics poets believe in imagination. Imagination is the main  one of the main element of Romantic Poetry.

● Back from set rules :

Poetry of the Romantic is different and contrast with the Neo Classical Poetry. Neo Classical Poetry was based on the 18th century rules and regulations. There were well prepared line of composition poetry. So the Romantic Poetry breaks all the rules and regulations of Neo Classical Poetry. They set New rules that the poetry should free style without following rules and regulations. So Romantic Poetry believe in free style of expressing emotions without using or follow any rules and regulations.
● Nature :
  In classical Age Poetry concerned with the clubs and coffee houses , social political life of London. So it was poetry about town life. In the Romantic Period Nature is main element of poetry. Because of Romantic Revival happened so the interst of poets was transformed from town to ruler life and from artifical decoration of rooms to the Natural beauty and loveliness of the Nature. So nature is most important element of this age. Wordsworth was a great example of Nature poet. His works were based on the physical and spiritual beauty of Nature. It shows the beauty and charm the people who could not see the beauty in wildflower, Green fields.
● Common Life :
 Romantic poets were interested into talking about the lives of the common people like Shepherd and gay butterflies of fashion. They interested into the simple life of people and it is marked as  poetry of Romantic Age. A feeling of humanitarism coloured the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley. So the Romantic Poetry was marked as a intense of human sympathy and understanding of human heart and human behaviours.
● Love of liberty and Freedom :

Romantic Poet love library and Freedom. In the classical age the poet not get freedom in expression of their emotions. But the Romantics poets believe in Freedom and liberty. This thing also expressed through their poetry. Poetry is based on the Liberty and Freedom of individual. Romantic Poet believe in the individual freedom of expression and emotions into their poetry. So the Literary and Freedom plays vital role into publishing and writing many poems in this age.


● Predominance of Imagination and Emotions :

  In the classical Poetry based on the Intellect and Reason. It is marked as a chief characteristics of classical Poetry but in Romantic Poetry reason is dominated by emotions , passion and imagination. So the Romantic Poets give more importance to imagination rather then reason and intellectual. So the imagination and Emotion is considered as a important characteristics of Romantic Poetry.
● Super Naturalism :

Supernaturalism is the main and important characteristics of Romantic Poetry. There are many poetry which is based on the Supernatural elements. Supernaturalism gives the special atmosphere to the poetry and it added extra charm , mystery and wonder. Poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge and Scott gave the sense  of wondering and Mystery into poetry.

● Endless Variety :

In the Romantic Poetry there endless form of variety. There are many types of variety sees in the Romantic Poetry. This age of poetry is full of varieties in the characters and moods of different writers.


● Simplicity in Style :

The style of the Romantic Poetry is simple. Romantic Poets believe in the simplicity in their style. They followed the simplicity in their works. They not followed the artifical mode of the expression of classical Poetry. They have express thoughts in natural Diction and spontaneity way.


The poets of Romanticism :

1)     William Wordsworth ( 1770-1850)
2)    Samuel Taylor Coleridge ( 1772 – 1834 )
3)    Robert Southey  ( 1774 – 1843 )
4)    Walter Scott ( 1771-1832 )
5)    George Gordon, Lord Byron ( 1788 – 1824 )
6)    Percy Bysshe Shelley ( 1792 – 1822 )
7)    John Keats ( 1795  - 1821 )

About  Wordsworth & Coleridge

Life of Wordsworth
Wordsworth was born in 1770 at Cokermouth, Cumberland. His mother died when he was eight years old and his father died some six year later and the orphan was taken in charge by relatives, who sent him to school at Huskshed in the beautiful lake region.

Here, apparently the unroofed school of nature attracted him more than the discipline of the Classics and he learned more eagerly from flowers and hills and stars than from his books.
Three thing in this poem must impress even the casual reader 

Ø First, Wordsworth loves to be alone and is never lonely with nature.

Ø Second, like every other child who spends much time alone in the woods & fields he feels the presence of some living spirit.

Ø Third, his impression are exactly like our own and delightfully familiar.
When he tells of the long summer day spent in swimming, basking in the sun and questing over the hills or the winter night when on his skates, he chased the reflection of a star in the black lie, or his exploring the lack in a boat and getting suddenly frightened when the world grew big and strange in all this he is simply recalling a multitude of our own vague, happy memories of childhood no man can read such readers without finding his boyhood again.

          The second period of Wordsworth’s life begins with his university course at Cambridge in 1787. All his life he was poor, and lived in an atmosphere of “plain living and high thinking”. Wordsworth was hailed by critics as the first living poet ,and one of the greatest that England had over produce. He died Tranquilly in 1850, at Grasmere. Poetry was his life, his soul was in all his works and only by reading what he was written can we understand the man.

Outwardly his long and uneventful life divides naturally into four periods;

1)    His childhood and youth in the Cumberland Hills from 1770-1787.

2)    A period of uncertainty of storm and streets, including his university life at Cambridge his travels abroad and his revolutionary experience from 1787-1797.

3)    A short but significant periods of finding himself and his work, from 1797 to 1799.

4)    A long period or retirement in the northern lake region where he was born and where for a full half century he lived so close to nature that her influence is reflected in all his poetry.

The poetry of Wordsworth

             William Wordsworth is the greatest poet of nature that our literature has produced. We find four characteristics of Wordsworth’s poetry. In his Exquisite ode, which he calls “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of early childhood (1807)”. Wordsworth sums up his philosophy of childhood.
“ Tintern Abbey ”,  “ The Rainbow ”, “ Ode to Duty ”, “ Intimations of Immortality” is very well known poem by Wordsworth the early poets o the revival began the good work of showing the “ romantic interest of common life” Wordsworth continued it in “Michael”, “The Excursion”. To this natural philosophy of man Wordsworth adds a mastic element, the result of his own belief that in every natural object there is a reflection of the living god.

Yet he excels especially in the face of nature in the expression of reflective and analytic mood which is both personal and general. The following lyric illustrates this mood to perfection :
                   “ My heart leaps up when I behold
                             A rainbow in the sky :
                       So was it when my life began;
                       So is it now I am a man ;
                       So be it when I shall grow old,
                             Or let me die
                       The Child is father of the man;
                       And I could wish my days to be
                       Bound each to each by natural piety.”
Nature is everywhere transfused and illumined by spirit, man also is a reflection of the devine spirit. The Home at Grasmere which is the first book of “ The Reause” was not published till 1888 long after poet’s death. “ The Excursion” is the second book of The Reause and the third was never completed.
     
   He tries to see more deeply and to find the secret springs of this joy and thanksgivings. He Says ;
                   “ To me the meanest flower that blows can give
                      Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”
         
The best Known of his work appeared in the “ Lyrical Ballad (1798)” and in the sonnets, Odes and Lyrical of the next ten years ; though “ The Duddon Sonnet (1820)”, “ To a Syklark (1825)”, and “ yarrow Revisited (1831)” shows that he retained till past sixty much of his youth enthusiasm.
       
 No other poet ever found such abundant beauty in the common world “He had not only sight, but insight”.     
          Thus, he was one of the great poet of romanticism.


Thank you.......................

Presentation of paper no 6

Paper no 6 from DivyaVaghela1

Presentation of paper no 5

Presentation of paper no 7 literary criticism

Presentation of paper no 7 from DivyaVaghela1

Presentation on paper no 8 Cultural study sem 2

Online discussion on cultural study and postcolonialism

Online discussion:Cultural study and postcolonialism

Sharmeen obaid Chinoy 's Got Oscar award for her documentary " A Girl in the River " has been much celebrated at home. It is about honor killing in Pakistan.

      Sharmeen’s films are about truly heroic Pakistani women — women who have suffered appalling cruelty and oppression but who have refused to be silenced. In telling their stories to the world, they have fought back and exposed injustice. It is shows the true situation of women that how they suffering so by showing this reality it brings awareness in society. It is not the situation of women in Pakistan but overall in  the world. We don't know many places where women are suffering. people not easily accept this reality. 

We may feel that this kind of writer wants to be famous in people by publishing this kind of work. Because to get more publicity they already knows which kind of work gives more publicity .
         In the country like India people has so many problems so they might feels that he or she is talking about us. They are arguing for us by publishing their work. 

    But yet it must require to talk against the power or  to talk about the real condition of the country . And we have great example of it is Ravish Kumar ,Who always draws the picture of real issues and also of real condition of the country .

Thank you....... 

Thinking activity on Gerald Gennet's Structralism.

Gerard Genette is a French literary theorist associated in particular with the Structuralist's movement and such figures as Roland Barthes and Claude Levi Strauss, from whom he adapted the concept of bricolage. Here, I apply his five concept which he used in Narrative Discourse: An essay in method:

1) Order

2) Frequency

3) Duration

4) Voice

5) Mood

• in literary theory, structuralism is an approach to analyzing the narrative material by examining the underlying invariant structure. for example, a literary critic applying a structuralist literary theory might say that the authors of west side story did not write anything "really" new, because their work has the same structure as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. 

it is not just advertisement of "Ariel" but in this advertisement we find very brif idea about equality of man and women.so i think structure of this advertisement is good.

              In this advertisement we can see feminism structure of our society. man and woman both are going out side to work for money but very few theme are share burden of housework. 'gender inequalities rooted' in not only our social structure but also in our mentality. i'm just saying that if man go out side for making money then wife do cooking, cleaning,laundry everything, both are making money than why they are not share all there responsibility?

Thank you....... 

Thinking Activity on Derrida and Deconstruction.

Derrida and Deconstruction............. 

Jacques Derrida was an Algerian born French philosopher best known for developing form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction. He is one of the major figures associated with post structuralism and postmodern philosophy.

The term deconstruction has become very popular in literary criticism and theory, its precise meaning is extremely problematic. It has had an enormous influence in psychology, literary theory, culture studies linguistics feminism, sociology and anthropology.  It has influenced a wide range of theoratical approaches to literary studies like feminism and gender studies, cultural materialism, new historicism post colonial studies, Marxism, Pychologysis and so on. It involves the close reading of text has irreconcilably contradictory meanings, rather than being a unified, logical whole. 

When we try to find out different between Structuralim theory and deconstruction theory then we easily define Deconstruction concept. Structuralism theory through to understand structure of the literature and define root of meaning. While deconstruction simple means is to see one thing in different ways. Most of when we read something at that time we can understand simple meaning but when we criticize any work or to re read something at that time we can deconstruction other meaning it means deconstruction.

Thank you.......... 

Thinking Activity on Andy Goldworthy's Rivers and Tides.

 We have watched this documentary on 14th March. Which was about nature and also interesting movie. Andy Goldsworthy was working with time. 

As we all know nothing remains permanent. As it is Andy Goldsworthy working with time and nature. Goldsworthy is famous throughout the world for his work in ice, stone, leaves, wood, and he felt that he has deep connection with the earth. May be he is working seasonal changes. He made a sculpture with the help of stones. One beautiful thing is he uses the natural background music. 

Some images of his art in movie. 

He creates mountain shape with stone in the river and show what is reaction of nature carry or change. This experiment through we can say he respects process of life and death. He created lot of things sometimes he became success and sometimes he became failure to making arts but he never deficted.

Goldsworthy says that "Art for me is a form of nourishment".  He notices sculpture, "The very thing that brought it to life, will bring about its death." The documentary described about Scottish landscapes. He talks about the impact of sheep on the Scottish landscape, and made a chain of green leaves and placed them in the water. Beautiful stonewall, crosses a field, and goes under a river, and emerges to wind through the trees on the other side.

He doesn't think about success and failure. He painted pictures on wall after the long time he shows what is change in painting. Then he criticizes his photography at that time his photography scriptures in collage day.

Thank you...........