Paper :7 Glossary of literary terms

Name: Jayshree Kunchala
Class: M.A., Part -1,
 SEM -2Roll No: 12
Paper: 7
Paper name: Literary theory and criticism The 20thWestern and Indian poetics
Submitted To: Maharaja shri Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.
A Glossary of Literary terms

 

Modernism:

The term modernism is widely used to identify new and distinctive features in the subjects, forms, concepts, and style of literature and the other arts in the early decades of the twentieth century but especially after World War 1 (1914-18) .The specific features signified by “modernism” very with the user, but many critics agree that it involves a deliberate and radical break with some of the traditional bases not only of western art but of western culture in general. Important intellectual precursors of Modernism in this sense are thinkers who had questioned the certainties that had supported traditional modes of social organization , religion and morality and also traditional ways of conceiving the human self thinkers who had questioned the certainties such as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) , Karl Marx , Sigmund Freud , and James G. Frazer , Whose twelve volume The Golden Bough (1890-1915) stressed the correspondence between central Christian tenets and pagan , often barbaric ,myths and rituals . Some literary historians locate the modernist revolt the far back as the 1890 but most agree that is called high modernism marked by an unexampled scope and rapidity of change came after the First World War. The year 1922 alone was signalized by the appearance of such monuments of modernist innovation as James Joyce's Ulysses, T.S.Eliot’s The west land and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob's room as well as many other experimental works of literature. The catastrophe of the war had shaken faith in the moral basis, coherence, and durability of western civilization and raised doubts about the adequacy of traditional literaryModes to represent the harsh and dissonant realities of the post world war.Postmodernism: The term postmodernism is often applied to the literature and art after word war 2 (1939-45) when the effects on western morals of first world war were greatly exacerbated by the experience of Nazi totalitarianism and mass extermination the threat of threat of total destruction by the atomic bomb the progressive devastation of the natural environment and the ominous fact of overpopulation. Postmodernism involves not only a continuation sometimes carried to an extreme of the counter tradition experiments of modernism but also diverse attempts to break away from modernist forms which had inevitably became in their tern conventional as well as over throw the elitism of modernist "high art “by recourse for models to the "mass culture" in the film television news paper cartoons and popular music. Many of the works of postmodern literature by Jorge Luis Borges Samuel Beckett Vladimir Nabokov Thomas Pynchon, Roland Barthes and many others so blend literary genres cultural and stylistic levels the serious and the playful that they resist classification according to traditional literary rubrics and this literary anomalies are paralleled in other arts by phenomena like pop art the musical compositions of john cage and films of jean juc godard and other directors.

New criticism:

This term made current by the publication of John crow Ransom’s the new criticism in 1941 came to be applied to a theory and practice that remained prominent in American literary criticism until late in the 1960s . the movement derived in considerable part from elements in I.a.Richards principles of literary criticism (1923) and practical criticism (1929) and from the critical essays of T.S.Eliot. It apposed a prevailing interest of scholars critics and teachers of that era in the biographies of authors in the social context of literature and in literary history by in insisting that the proper concern of literary criticism is not with the external circumstances or effects or historical position of a work but with a detailed consideration of the work itself as an independent entity . Notable critics in this mode were the southerners Clenth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, whose textbook understanding fiction (1942)did much to make the new criticism the predominant method of teaching literature in American colleges and even in high schools for the next two or three decades other prominent writer of that time in edition to to Ransom, Brooks and warren who are often identified as new critics are Tllen Tate R.P.Blackmur and and William K. Wimsatt
Postcolonial Studies: The critical analysis of history, culture, literature and modes of discourse that are specific to the former colonies of England , Spain ,France and other European imperial powers . These studies have focused especially on the third countries in Africa ,Asia , The Caribbean Islands and south America . Some scholars’ however extend the scope of such analyses also to the discourse and cultural productions of countries such as Australia , Canada ,and New Zealand which achieved independence much earlier that the third world countries. Post colonial Studies sometimes also encompass aspect of British literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries viewed through a perspective that reveals the ways in which the social and economic life represented in that literature was tacitly underwritten by colonial exploitation . Feminist criticism : As a distinctive and concerted approach to literature . Feminist criticism was not inaugurated until late in the 1960s. Behind it however lie two centuries of struggle for the recognition of women’s cultural roles and achievement and for Women’s social and political rights marked by such books as Mary Wollstonecraft’s A vindication of the rights of woman (1792) John Stuart Mills The subjection of women (1869) and the American Margaret fuller’s woman in the Nineteenth century (1845) much of feministic literary criticism continues in our time to be interrelated with the movement by political feminists for social ,legal , and cultural freedom and equality. Psychoanalytical Criticism :
Since the 1920s . A widespread type of psychological criticism whose premises and procedures were established by Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939) . Freud had developed the dynamic form of psychology that he called “Psychoanalysis” as a procedure for the analysis and therapy of neuroses, but soon expanded it to account for many developments and practices in the history of civilization , including warfare ,mythology and religion as well literature and other arts . Freud ‘s brief comment on the working of the artist imagination at the end of the third lecture of his “introduction to psychoanalysis”(1920) supplemented by relevant passages in the other lectures in the book ,set forth the theoretical framework of what is sometimes called classical psychoanalysis criticism. Freud proposes that literature and other art like dreams and neurotic symptoms, consist of the imagined or fantasized fulfillment of wishes that are either denied by reality or prohibited by the social standards of morality and propriety. The forbidden mainly sexual (“libidinal”) wishes comes into conflict with “censor” (the internalized) representative within each individual of a society’s standards of morality and propriety) And are repressed by a the censor into the of artist’s mind but are permitted to achieve a fantaside satisfaction in distorted forms that serves to disguise their real motives and objects from the conscious mind.New Historicism : New historicism since the early 1980s. has been the accepted name for a made of literary study that its proponents opposed to the formalism they a attribute both to the new criticism and to the critical deconstruction that followed it . In place of dealing in text of isolate ion from it historical context new historicists attend primarily to the historical and cultural condition of its production its meaning it s effects and also of its historical context new s and historicists attend primarily to the historical and cultural conditions on its effect and also of its later critical interpretations and evaluations . This is not simply a return to an earlier kind of literary scholarship for the views and practices of the new historicists differ markedly from these of earlier scholars who had adverted to social and intellectual history as a “background” against which to set a work of literature as an independent entity or had viewed literature as a ‘reflection’ of world viewed characteristic of a period . Instead new historicists conceive of a literary text as “situated” with in the totality of the institutions social practices. And discourse that constitute the culture of a particular time and place with which the literary text interacts as both a product and a producer of cultural energies and codes. Eco criticism : Eco criticism was a term coined in the late 1970s. by combining “criticism” with a shortened form of “ecology” the science that investigates the interrelations of all forms of plant and animal life with each other and with their physical habitats. “Ecocriticism” (or by alternative names environmental criticism and green studies) designates the critical writings which explores the relation between literature and biological and physical environment conducted with an acute awareness of the damage being wrought on that environment by human activities. Re presentations of the natural environment are as old as recorded literature and were prominent in the account of the garden of Eden in the Hebrew Bible as well as in the pastoral form inaugurated by the Greek Theocritus in the third century Bc and later imitated by the roman poet Virgil-an idealized depiction of rural life viewed as a survival of the simplicity , peace and harmony that had been lost by a complex and urban society.Queer Theory : Queer theory is often used to designate the combined area of gay and lesbian studies ,together with the theoretical and critical writings about all modes of variance such as cross dressing, bisexuality and transsexuality from society’s normative order of sexual identity orientation and activities. The term “queer” was originally derogatory, used to stigmatize male and female same sex love as deviant and unnatural ; since the early 1990s. however it has been adopted by gays and lesbians themselves as a noninvidious term to identify a way of life and an area for scholarly inquiry. See Teresa de lauretis queer theory: An introduction 1996s.
Both Lesbian studies and gay studies began as “liberation movement” in parallel with movements for African American and feminist libration during the anti-Vietnam war, anti establishment and countercultural ferment of the late 1960s. Since that time these studies have maintained a close relation to the activists who strive to achieve for gays and lesbians political ,legal, and economic rights equal to those of the heterosexual majority. Through the 1970s the two movements were primarily separatist : gays often through of themselves as quintessentially male while many lesbians aligning themselves with the feminist movement characterized the gay movement as sharing the anti –female attitudes of the reigning patriarchal culture . There has however been a growing recognition (signalized by adoption of the joint term “queer”) of the degree to which the two group share a history as a suppressed minority and possess common political and social aims.Structuralism: Almost all literary theorists beginning with Aristotle have emphasize the importance of structure conceived in diverse ways in analyzing a work of literature. (See from and structure) “structuralist criticism” however new designates the practice of critics who analyze literature on the explicit model of structuralist linguistics. The class includes a number of Russian formalists , especially Roman Jacobson, but consists most prominently of a group of writers with their headquarters in Paris who applied to literature the concepts and analytic distinction developed by Ferdinand de Saussure in his course in general linguistics (1915). This mode of criticism is part of a larger movement French Structuralism. In angulated in the 1950s. by the cultural anthropologist Claude Levi –Strauss who analyzed on the model of Saussure’s linguistics such cultural phenomena as mythology kinship relations and modes of preparing food. See linguistics and literary criticism. Alamkara School –Bahamas : Alamkara is the earliest and the most sustained school it studies literary language and assumes that the locus on literariness is in the Figures of speech in the mode of figurative expression in the grammatical accuracy and pleasantness of sound (euphony) . Bahamas is the first alamkara poetician. In chapter 2 or 3 of kavyalankara, he describes 35 figures of speech. The question is a figure of speech external to poetry an ornament or it is an integral part of conceptualization and of the way the post visualizes metaphor for example relates to imaginative perception: “See how the moonlight Sleep on the bank” It is the perception itself? Or it is just one Method of repritzesenting the perception ? For Ruyyaka (Alamkarasaruasua) it may be noted. Alamkara is the Brahma of poetry and not mere embellishment (see Dwivedi 1979-57) Bhoja did not provide a fresh classification but added the third category ubhayalamkara to the two major types of Rudrata. Ruyyaka classified alamkara in to seven classes on the basis of their (content) meaning on the basis of how meaning is constituted: 1.Sadrsya (similarity) 2.Virodha(opposition) 3.Srnkhalabadha(chain-bound) 4.Tarka Nyaya (reasoning ,logic) 5.Lokanyaya (Popular logic) 6.Kavya nyaya (logic for poetry) 7.Gudhartha pratiti(inference of meaning) Mammata enumerates sixty one figures and group them into seven types. 1.Upama (simile) 2.Rupaka (metaphor) 3.Aprastuta prasamsa (indirect) 4.Dipaka (stringed figures) 5.Vyatireka (dissimilitude) 6.Virodha (contradiction) 7.Samuccaya (concatenation)

Riti School:

Riti is a theory of language of literature. Through it is described for the first time in Bharata’s Natyasastra. Itself under the rubricof vrtti ,it is Vamana who developed it into a theory as the theory of visista padaracana riti – formation of or arrangement of marked inflected construction is riti.
Two other words used for riti are marga and vrtti later Anand vardhana (19th century A.D.) distinguished these style on the basis of the use of particular kinds of compounds. Dandian uses the term marga and talks of two margas . Mammata designates the different modes as a vrttis.
Riti correlate with one themes ,effects on the hearers/viewers and sentiments Bharata has all the three in mind in his discussion of vrttis :
(1)Kaisiki
(2)Bharati
(3)Sattavati
(4)Arbhatti.
Viswanatha considers proper organization of language as riti words and phrases have to be properly selected and organized and poetry and this is necessary for rasas and bhavas . Ritis are defined by gynas as well Riti may be called diction particularly when guna /dosa become part of the discussion . But riti is much more than diction. Basically it is a theory that handles the phychophonetic fitness of language for speakers themes and sentiments and there for become study of cftmanship and psychology of speech.
Dhvani school of Aananda Vardhana:
Next only to the rasa theory in importance the dhvani theory of aananda vardhana considers suggestion the indirectly evoked meaning as the characteristic property of literary discourse the determinant that separates it from other rational discourses. As articulated in Dhvanyaloka dhvani becomes an all embracing principal that explains the structure and function of the other major elements of literature. The aesthetic effect the figural mode and devices the stylistic value es and excellences and defects.
Anandavardhana is openly indebte to Bhartrharis sphota theory and he acknowledges it in Dhvanyaloka where as Krishna moorthy has explained Anandavardhana notes that he has chosen the term dhvani following definite use of that term by the grammarians to denote (1)The sound structure of words (2)The semantic aspect of sabda the vyanjakas of suggester and (3)the revealed of suggested meaning as such and the process of suggestion involved dhvni theory is theory of meaning of symbolism and this principale leades to the poetry of suggestion being accepted as the highest kind of poetry.
The goal is development of rasa mere suggestion does not make poetry for example the use of “he is a villager” to suggest his nonurban manners . Anandvardhana stresses the importance of taking the whole poem so that the over tone of the suggested sense are fully grasped llisolated instances acqyaire full meaning in the context of the whole composition.
Vakrokti school Kuntaka :
Vakrokti is also a theory of language of literature . It claims that the characteristic poetry of literary language is its markedness it deviates in identifiable ways from ordinary language in its form and its constitution of meaning.
Kuntaka made vakrokti a full fledged theory of literariness. His definition of vakrokti is –“bOth words and meanings marked by artistic turn of speech” Vakrokti literally means vakrokti deviant or expression and can also mean special denotation. It may be properly translated as markedness. Kuntaka classifies vakrokti into six heads.
(1) In syllables or their arrangements,
(2) In the base substantives
(3) In inflected forms of substantives,
(4) In sentences including figures of speech
(5) In topic or sections
(6) In the hole composition

Ayatya School : 

 The theory of propriety or appropriateness cleims that in all aspects of literary composition there is the possibility of a perfect the most appropriate choice of subject of ideas of words of devices. As such it has affinities with Longinus’s theory of the sublime the concept of propriety with reference to custom, subject, character, and sentiment recurs in almost all theorists and is often in association with figures of speech guna/dosa and riti . Aanandavdhana relates thiciple specifically to rasa it has been used for propriety in delineating behave according to the speaker content and type of literary composition. Ksemendra and aucitya the central element of literariness he defines aucitya as the property of an expression being an exact and appropriate analogue of the expressed.

love inter micahanisam in woman in middlemarch

Name: Jayshree Kunchala
Class: M.A.,Part -1 ,Sem -2
Roll No: 12
Paper : 6
Paper name: The Victorian Literature
Assignment Topic: inter love machination in middle
March.
Submitted To: Maharaja shri Krishnakumarsinhji
Bhavnagar University.

 

Introduction:

The novel opens with a brief prelude or introduction in which the readers are introduced to Dorothea Brooke, a cultured and high minded young lady with lofty aspirations. She is referred to as a later day st.Theresa of the midlands who could not achieve anything noble because of the lack of opportunity, because her environment was unfavorable and repressive.
Dorothea and her sister Celia live with their uncle , Mr.Arthure Brooke at Tipton Grange near the midland town of middle march. Celia is more practical than her elder sister who is idealistic dreams of lofty achievements and seeks an outlet for aspirations in improving the living conditions of the poor. Multiplicity of women Characters:
The canvass of Middle march is a crowded one. It is a long novel running into over eight hundred minutely printed pages in the penguin edition. There is a host of characters, so many that all of them cannot even be named in the space, at our disposal. The major characters may be divided into four groups. First there are the books consisting of Mr. Edward Brooke and his two nieces Dorothea Brooke the elder sister and Celia the younger one. They reside at Tipton Grange near the town of Middle march. Secondly there are the Vincy, the father and the head of the family Mr. Walter vincy his elder son Fred Vincy his daughter Rosamond vincy and Mr. Lucy vincy his wife. Thirdly there are the Garth Caleb Garth his Daughter Mary Garth his sons Alfred Garth and others. Fourthly there are Casaubon’s Mrs. Edward Casaubon’s a clergy and scholar residing at lowick manor, and his cousin ladislaw. Other importance characters are peter Featherstone. A rich miser owner of stone court. Joshua Rigg his illegitimate son ; John Raffles the drunken step father of Rigg: Nicholas Bestrode a rich banker his wife Harriet Bulstrode; sir James chettam a amiable Baronet who marries Celia; and Tertius lydgate a doctor of advanced views and an outsider in Middlemarch. Of the minor characters more importance ones are Mr.Cadwallader reverend Mr. Camden Fare brother his mother Mrs.Farebroher, and his sister Winifred Fare brother. There is also Mr. Toller a well established doctor of Middlemarch and rival to Lydgate ; Reverend Mr. Tyke the curate ; Trumbull the auctioneer,etc.The list is a long one and it is by no means exhaustive or all-inclusive.
Themes and Ideas:
Middlemarch is a complex work of art and also number of themes and ideas stand out of it. First there is the theme of noble aspirations frustrated both by repressive environment meanness of opportunity and “the spots of commonness” in the character concerned. Dorothea and lydgate are the two main characters who are frustrated in this way. Secondly there the theme of Therasa complex in the novelist her self . Thirdly there is the theme of self education and depiction of the slow process through which a character shades his ego and his delusions and attains spiritual regeneration and a better and fuller life. Lastly there is also the clash of the old and the new depiction of how the past shapes the future and from the future is controlled and determined by the present.
The Women character of in these Novel:
(1)Dorothea Brooke
(2)Celia Brooke
(3)Harriet Bulstrode
(4)Julia Casaubon
(5)Lucy Vincy
(6)Mary Garth
Charming and Beautiful of Dorothea Brooke:
Dorothea Brooke is a young and Fascinating lady who lives with her younger sister Celia at Tipton Grange near Middlemarch the home of Mr. Arthur Brooke their uncle and Guardian. Her physical beauty and fascinating personality have been stressed in the very beginning of the novel. We are told “miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so sleeves not lees bare of style than those in which the Blessed virgin appeared to Italian painters and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain more dignity from her pain garments which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible- or from one of our elder poets in a paragraph of today’s news paper”.
Not any Heroin in the Novel.
Dorothea Brooke is the first major character to be introduced to us and the prelude to the novel creates the impression that she is its heroine. But it is not so. She is no doubt, one of the most important character in the novel and it deals with the frustration of her aspirations .still she is not the heroine for Middlemarch is the story of Middlemarch society and if anyone is its hero it is Middlemarch itself.

Idealistic ,Theoretic Nature:

Dorothea Brooke is a lady with noble aspirations. She wants to lead a higher life to achieve something really noble. She is the extra ordinary individual thrown upon a common place world. She seeks an outlet for her higher aspirations in doing humanitarian work. Thus she makes plans and projects to improve the living condition of the tenants on the estate of the Baronet sir chettam. She is different from other ladies of her age and this difference is stressed by contrasting her with her sister Celia. Celia is an ordinary normal girl with a girlish fondness for jewellery and fine clothes. Dorothea looks down upon such feminine frivolities Celia notices Casaubon’s age and his two white moles with hairs on them Dorothea remains completely oblivious to such physical details. She sees in him a reflection of Locke or Milton and accepts him as her husband in preference to young and handsome for Twould be able to achieve her aspirations.
The Theresa –Complex:
Dorothea what has been called the Theresa complex ;I.e.
“a yearning to do good in the world which is so intense that it must answer to some emotional need in the Theresa her self”.
Theresa was an Christian saint who had such a yearning. Dorothea has been referred to in the prelude as a later Theresa. We are told “here and there is born and saint Theresa foundress of nothing whose loving heart beats and sobs after and an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances instead of centering in some long recognizable dead”. She is Theresa in her lofty aspirations “struggling under dim lights and entangled circumstances”, to achieve her aspirations but she lives in society in which there is no particular demand for Theresa. It is a repressive environment which allows no scope foe lofty ideals, where such idealistic natures are frustrated crushed to atoms. Or compelled to compromise with their environment.

Inner frustration of Dorothea:

The most that she can do in the society of Middlemarch is to make projects for building better cottages for poor tenants and thus ameliorating their lot. It is this inner frustration which makes her seize any opportunity which offers her a chance of self fulfillment. It is this which makes her accepts Casaubon in place of sir Chettam despite his age and his physical unpleasantness. She marries him not because any sexual consideration but because “she has vague religious aspirations looks down upon the excellent country gentleman, sir James chettam and fancies that she would like to marry the Judicious Hooker or Milton in his blindness’.
Dorothea’s unfortunate consequences.
In her view “the really delightful marriage must be that were your husband was a sort of father and could each you even Hebrew ,if you wished it”. The word father here is important .It is both an early signal to the reader of what will follow when Casaubon comes on the scene and a revelation of what is lacking in Dorothea which any other girl would have . She is deeply conscious of gender. Leading to a complete difference of intellectual and spiritual function. She is scarcely at all at this stage conscious of sex But perhaps no persons than living certainly none in the neighborhood of Tipton-would have had a sympathetic understanding for the dreams of a girl whose nations about marriage took their color entirely from an exalted enthusiasm about the ends of life an enthusiasm which was lit by its own fire and included neither the niceties of the trousseau the pattern of the plate not even the honors and sweet joys of the blooming matron.
Dorothea’s self Decision and suffering
She is lofty, lofty, idealistic straight forward and honest and also self-deluded and self deceived. Carried away by her lofty ideals she fails to see the reality she remains c even to most obvious truths. She fails to understand the real character of Casaubon-that he is a prig and pedant a wooden character incapable of love any enjoyment of life until it is too late . This self delusion is her “spot of commonness” and the real cause of the tragedy of her life.

Vain and inconsiderate:

Dorothea is self deluded in another way also. She thinks that she is entirely free from the little vanities and frivolities of the fairest but such vanities still lurk within her. This is clearly brought out through the séance in which the two sister divide their jewellery. The episode shows that she is self-centered and self deceiving and as consequence, often inconsiderate and harsh according to A.O.J. Co shut, it is a weakness of characters of this kind to make no allowance for the existence of other temperaments and other interests without meaning to be harsh on Celia takes.
Comparison with Celia.
Celia the simpler nature with her perfectly normal and unconcealed wish to wear splendid jewellery is here the more objective of the two. “And throughout these early chapter Celia is used to shows by contrast the more obscure character of Dorothea it would be wrong to think of Dorothea as entirely remote from mundane concerns. She is very anxious once she has agreed to marry Casaubon to get the people well housed in lowick.

The note of irony and satire.

It is for this reason that lesliestephen goes to the extent of saying that Dorothea is a satire is on young ladies with noble aspirations. To passage quote his own words.
“Dorothy’s mistake was not that she married a man who had not read German but that she married a stick instead of a man”.
Conclusion:
Thus in the Victorian tradition of the novel all the difficulties and complications are resolved in the end and all the characters are happily united. Even Bulstrode who had to suffer disgrace and give up all his public offices at last achieves a measure of serenity. His wife who had been much shocked by the discovery of his past remains loyal to him and does much to console and comfort him in his time of trouble.
The novel has its faults still it remains a great classic and a masterpiece.

Mary Garth:

The practical pain and kind daughter of Celeb and Susan Garth, she works as Mr.featherstone nurse. She and Fred Vincy were childhood sweethearts but she refuses even to encourage him to who her until he shows himself willingly and able to live seriously practically and sincerely.

Celia Brooke.

Dorothea’s more conventional younger sister who does not share Dorothea’s idealism and asceticism.
Dorothhea as sister, Celia is an amiable , innocent looking , down to earth young lady ; her attitude towards Dorothea is a “mixture of criticism and aew”,and on “safe opportunities she has the knack” of making her negative wisdom tell…… by remanding he that people were staring not listening “again in contrast to Dorothea she is not impulsive she waits the appropriate opportunity. To voice her views and always in a tone of ‘quiet’ staccato evenness”.

Paper :8 What is cultural study?

Name : Jayshree Kunchala
Class : M.A.,Part -1 ,Sem -2
Roll No : 12
Paper : 8
Paper name : The Cultural Studies
Submitted To : Maharaja shri Krishnakumarsinhji
Bhavnagar University.

 

What is a “cultural Studies”?

A college class on the American novel is reading Alice Walker’s The color Purple (1982). The identifies African American Literary and cultural sources and describes the books multilayered narrative structure moving on to a brief review of its feminist critique of American gender and racial attitudes. Students and professor discuss these various approaches, analyzing key passages in the novel.
A continuous voice in the back of the room”well i just want know what a serious film was doing with oprahwinfrey in it”. This is quickly answered by another student,Dude,she dose huge a book club on her show class members respondes to this points examinig interrelationship among race ,gender ,populer culture’s the media and literature.
Cultural studies approaches generally share four goals
Frist cultural studies transcend the confines of a dicipline such as literary criticism or history. Praticed in such jornals as critical inquiry. Reprasentation and boundary 2.culturalstudies involves scrutinizing the cultural phenomenon of a text for example,italian opera,a latino telenovela the architectural style of prisons,body piercing and drawing conclusion abot the changes in textual phenomena over time.cultural studies is note nesessary about literature in the traditional sense or even about art. in their introduction to cultural studes,editors lowrence Grossberg,cary nelson and paula treichler emphasize that they intellectual promise of cultural studise lise in its attempts to cut across diverse social and political interests and and address many of the struggles with in the current scene’’.
Intellectual works are note lirnited by their own “Dorders” as single texts, historical problems or disciplines and the critics own personal connections to what is being analyzed may also be described. Henry Giroux and other write in their Dalhousie review manifesto that cultural studies practitioners are ‘resisting intellectuals’ who see what they do as “an emancipator project” because it erodes the traditional disciplinary divisions in most institutions of higher education for students this sometimes means that a professor might make his or her political views part of the instruction which of course can lead to problems. But this kind of criticism like feminism is an engaged rather that a detached activity.
Second cultural studies in politically engaged cultural critics see themselves as “oppositional” not only within their own disciples but to many of the power structures of society at large. They question inequalities within power structures and seek to discover. Models for restructuring relationships among dominant and “minority “or “subaltern” discourses.Besause meaning and individual subjectivity are culturally constructed they can thus be reconstructed. Such a notion taken to a philosophical extreme denies the autonomy of the individual whether an actual person or a character in literature, a rebuttal of the traditional humanistic “great Man” or “great book” theory and relocation of aesthetics and culture from ideal realms of taste and sensibility into the arena of a whole society’s everyday life as it is constructed.
A third cultural study denies the separation of “high” and “low” or elite or popular culture. You might hear someone remark at the symphony or at an art museum: “I came here to gate a little culture”. Being a “cultured” person used to mean being a acquainted with “highbrow “art and intellectual pursuits. But isn’t culture used to be found with a pair of tickets to a rock concert? Cultural critics today work to transfer the term culture to include mass culture weather popular folk or urban. Following theorists Jean Baundriland and Andreas Hussein, cultural critics argues that after word war 2 the distinctions among Hugh low and mass culture collapsed and they cite other theorists such as Pierre Bourirdieu and Dick Hebdige on how “good taste” often only reflects prevailing social, economic and political power bases. For example ,the image of India that were circulated during the colonial rule of the British raj by writers like Rudyard Kipling seem innocent but reveal an entrenched imperialist argument for white superiority and world wide domination of ther races especially Asian. But race along was not issue for the British raj money was also deciding factor. Thus drawing also upon the ideas of French historian Michel de certeau cultural critics examine “the practice of everyday life” studying literature as an anthropologist would as a phenomenon of culture including a cultures economy. Rather than determining which are the best work produced cultural critic described what is produced and how various productions relate to one another .They aim to reveal the political economic reasons way a certain cultural product is more valued at certain time than others.

Cultural Studies

In Cultural Studies, 'culture' is understood very broadly, but with a strong emphasis on local everyday life. Cultural Studies does not follow traditional distinctions between 'high' and 'low' culture; a Radiohead video becomes a significant cultural text alongside, say, a classical opera. Cultural Studies looks at many cultural forms which have often been ignored by universities: advertising, media, music, fashion, sport and leisure are shown to be extremely powerful political forces in shaping our societies and our identities.
Cultural Studies means studying culture - but from particular angles
A lot of attention is paid to contemporary theories of culture, including questions of how culture is produced, how we use and interpret culture, how culture can be preserved, destroyed, or changed, how our sense of identity merges with our culture, and what is happening to culture in the new world of commodity circulation, communications and information technologies, and globalisation.
'Culture' is understood in a very broad sense, including all the social processes of everyday life. Cultural Studies questions traditional distinctions between 'high' and 'low' culture, and shows that everyday life may be the object of complex and significant analysis. Many cultural forms which have often been ignored by universities become prominent here: advertising, media, music, fashion, sport and leisure are shown to be extremely powerful political forces in shaping our societies and our identities.
In Australian, American, and European universities where Cultural Studies has developed hugely in the last two decades, one of its central strengths is seen to be its cross-disciplinarity, that is, the way that it draws on the perspectives, methods, and theories of numerous fields of study. The idea is not to reduce culture to something simple and unified, but to appreciate its complexity. The programme being developed at Canterbury draws on more than fifteen participating programmes-most of the Faculty of Arts!
Cultural Studies explores culture, power, and identity. In Cultural Studies, we analyze a wide variety of forms of cultural expression, such as TV, film, advertising, literature, art, and video games. As well, we study social and cultural practices, like shopping, cell phone use, and social justice movements. We are concerned with thinking about identity and social roles, including gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation. Cultural Studies research and teaching seeks to be self-critical, self-reflexive, and engaged. It challenges dominant or “normal” assumptions about who we are, in relation to others, and how.
“culture has two aspects: the known meanings and directions, which its members are trained to; the new observations and meanings, which are offered and tested. These are the ordinary processes of human societies and human minds, and we see through them the nature of a culture: that it is always both traditional and creative; that it is both the most ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings. We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a whole way of life--the common meanings; to mean the arts and learning--the special processes of discovery and creative effort.” – Raymond Williams
“To educate as the practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn. That learning process comes easiest to those of us who teach who also believe that there is an aspect of our vocation that is sacred; who believe that our work is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students.” – bell hooks
“It is this underlying philosophical nature that gives this program significance. What one thinks they know about popular cultural can become completely destabilized and reorganized to create an entirely different understanding of the world in which we live. It is in this way that cultural studies explores larger layers of significance and meaning in the world because it reveals aspects of the familiar that are hidden, confusing and meaningful.” – Alex (Student)
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Critical note on romantic literature

Name : Jayshree Kunchala
Class : M.A.,Part -1 ,Sem -2
Roll No : 12
Paper :5
Paper name : The Romantic Literature
Submitted To : Maharaja shri Krishnakumarsinhji  Bhavnagar University.

 

Introduction

The fiction written during the Romantic period is often studied in ways that focus on its historical context but skirt around the issue of its relationship to concepts of Romanticism itself, although many critics regard some concept of Romanticism as central to the interpretation of literature written between 1785 and 1832. Since what we have come to identify as ‘Romanticism’ is based mainly on readings of the poetry of the period, I intend to discuss not only whether some significant novels of this period can be considered ‘Romantic’ in a similar way to much of its poetry, but also whether these significant novels enlarge the received notion of what the canon of the Romantic age comprises.

One has to ask whether the ‘novels of the Romantic age’ can be said to form a coherent group. Recent criticism has tended to group novels of the era thematically, focusing, for instance, on regional novels, such as those by Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson, which are set in Ireland, and by Walter Scott in Scotland; on fiction by women writers, including Austen, Frances Burney, Edgeworth, Mary Shelley and others; or on novelists who engage with some of the political upheavals of the 1790s, such as William Godwin, Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Hays, Thomas Holcroft and Mary Wollstonecraft. The majority of novels written during this era share some thematic preoccupations, such as sensibility, nationalism, the Gothic, and the sublime in nature to an extent that is unique to the period. A significant number of interesting novels that are not classified as ‘Gothic novels’ or ‘novels of sensibility’ nonetheless engage with these preoccupations satirically: Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818) and Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey (1818) both make a central feature of Gothic conventions and language, while Matthew Lewis’s uber-Gothic novel The Monk (1796) also pokes fun at many conventional Gothic tropes and plot devices. Yet more novels are frequently classified under one sub-genre but gesture towards others: Godwin’s Caleb Williams is seen as the great Jacobin novel of the 1790s, but it is also a Gothic novel, while Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, set in Scotland, could be described as regional Gothic. Tropes such as the sublime landscape and ancient castle are practically ubiquitous in regional novels as well as in Gothic ones.

In his comprehensive study English Fiction of the Romantic Period, Gary Kelly attempts to characterize the Romantic novel in his description of Jane Austen as the ‘representative Romantic novelist’:

she deals superbly with the central thematic and formal issues of the novel of the period – the gentrification of the professional classes and the professionalization of the gentry, the place of women in a professionalized culture that denies them any significant role in public or professional life, the establishment of a ‘national’ culture of distinction and discrimination in the face of fashionand commercialised culture, the re-siting of the authentic self in an inward moral and intellectual being so cultivated as to be able to negotiate successfully the varieties of social experience and cultural discriminations, the establishment of a standard speech based on writing, and resolution of the relationship of aut horitative narration and detailed representation of subjective experience.

However, while this description fits many novels of the Romantic age, at least to some extent, the characteristics he lists contrast sharply with what he later refers to as ‘the central characteristics and achievements of Romantic poetry … intense, transcendent and reflexive subjectivity, supernatural naturalism and discursive self-consciousness’.In a subsequent essay discussing ‘Romantic Fiction’, Kelly concludes by comparing these two versions of Romanticism, that of poetry and that of fiction, to imply that the predominant aims of the literature of the period were those of its novelists, whom he considers to have achieved as much or more than its poets in exploring domestic affections, local life, and national culture. These aims are not, however, the central concerns in a Gothic novel such as Vathek any more than in a poem such as ‘Kubla Khan’; whereas ‘the domestic affections and local quotidian life’,for instance, are as much if differently explored in Wordsworth’s poems as they are in Austen’s novels.

The majority of the novels of the Romantic age tend to support Kelly’s view that their predominant ideology is a bourgeois one, since the almost inevitable resolution of the plot with one or more marriages would seem to valorize middle-class ‘quotidian’ life and the ‘domestic affections’, while the ‘realism’ of many novels also tends to mjdeflate romantic idealism through collision with the commonplace. This deflation occurs in Radcliffe’s novels through the marriage plot and her characteristic device of the ‘supernatural explained’, where she accounts for supernatural events in rational terms, and in Austen’s, through her ‘punishment’ of sensibility in heroines such as Marianne in Sense and Sensibility(1811).

A related Romantic project was to valorize the poet and to resist the marginalization of the artist in an increasingly industrialized, mercantile, and bourgeois-dominated British society. This is expressed in autobiographical and semi-autobiographical poems by male poets including Wordsworth and Byron, and epitomized in the construction of the poet as Promethean creator. Many of the most influential and widely read fiction-writers of the period, including Austen, Burney, Edgeworth, Radcliffe, Scott, and Mary Shelley, implicitly or overtly support the changes in British society, although with qualifications, stressing the importance of family life and rational judgement, and implicitly or overtly condemn the perceived ‘Romantic’ personality cultivated and cult-ified by many Romantic poets.

In English Fiction of the Romantic Period, Kelly reveals the limitations of his aforementioned generalizations, since his list of sub-genres of Romantic fiction is an assemblage of contraries: Jacobin novels, anti-Jacobin novels, Gothic, Gothic Romance, novels of sensibility, national tales, moral tales, tales of fashionable life, tales of the heart, tales of real life, historical romances, tales for youth, tales of wonder, Scotch novels, ‘silver fork’ novels, ‘Newgate’ novels, and the Romantic quasi-novel. Several of these kinds of novel have little, if anything, in common with Romantic poetry: ‘Anti-Jacobin novels’, and ‘tales of real life’, in particular, were thematically and formally in opposition to the Romantic cult of the imagination and sensibility. Yet Gothic novels, for example those by Ann Radcliffe, have much that is in common with Romantic poetry, in terms of both language and themes – for instance the transcendentalizing of nature, and the significance accorded to an emotional response to such landscapes.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

His life

Wordsworth was born at cocker mouth, a town which is actually outside the lake district, but well within hail of it. His Father, who was a lawyer, died when William was thirteen years old. The elder wordsworth left very little money, and that was mainly in the form of a claim on lord Lonsdale, who refused outright to pay his debt, so that William had to depend on the generosity of two uncles, who paid for his schooling at hawks head near lake Windermere. Subsequently wordsworth went to Cambridge entering st John’s college in 1787.His work at the university was quite undistinguished and having graduated in 1791 he left with no fixed career in view. After spending a few months in London he crossed over to France (1791) and stayed at Orleans and Blois for nearly a year. An enthusiasm for the revolution was aroused in him ;he himself has chronicled the mood in one of his happiest passages:
Bliss was it in that
Dawn to be alive,
But to be young
Was very heaven!
He returned to Paris in 1792, Just after the September massacres, and the sights and stories that greeted him. The dominant political doctrine. It was there that the two poets took the series of walks the fruit of which was to be the lyrical ballads. Wordsworth after a visit to Germany in 1798-99 the wordsworth settled the lake district which was to be their home for the future.
Poetry of Wordsworth
He records that his earliest verses were written at school, and that they were “a time imitation of pope’s versification”. This is an interesting admission of the still surviving domination of the earlier poet. At the university he composed some poetry . which appeared as an Evening walk (1793)and descriptive sketches(1793). In style these poem have little have little originality but they already show the wordsworthian eye for nature. The first fruits of his genius were seen in the lyrical Ballads (1798) a joint production by Coleridge and himself which was published at Bristol l.
This volume is epoch-making for it is the prelude to the Romantic movement proper Wordsworth had the larger share in the book. Some his poems in it such as the thorn and the Idiot, boy, are condemned as being trivial and childish in style a few such as Simon lee and expostulation. And reply are more adequate in their expression ; and the concluding piece Intern Abbey , is one of the triumphs of his genius.
During the years 1798-99 wordsworth composed some of his finest poems which appeared in 1800 , together with his contributions to the lyrical ballads.
The prelude which was completed in 1805 but not published 1850 after wordsworth death is record of his development as a poet he described his experiences with a fullness ,closeness and laborious anxiety that are unique in our literature . the prelude was intended to form part of a vast philosophical work called the recluse which was never completed . Another section of his same work was the excursion much of which was composed in the years now under riewe through it was not published until 1814.

His Theory of poetry:

In the preface to the second edition of thy lyrical Ballads (1800) Wordsworth set out his theory of poetry It reveals a lofty conception of the dignity of that art which is “The breath and finer spirit of all knowledge”. And which is product of “The spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”. Taking its origin from “emotion recollected in tranquility”.
(a) Reading subject wordsworth readers his preference for “incidents and situations from common life”. Was generally chosen because in that condition the essential passion of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain thegir maturity”.
(b) Wordsworth views on poetical style are the most revolutionary of all the ideas in this preface. Disaccording the “gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers it is touchingly simple in some of his Lucy poems. Gay and other lyrics.
Features of his poetry:
(a) Its inequality and its limitations all the critics of wordsworth are at pains to points out the mass of inferior work that came from his pen . Matthew Arnold one of the acutest of the poet’s admirers closes the recorded of wordsworth best work with year 1808, even before the completion of the excursion.
(b) Its egoism. In a person of lesser caliber such a degree of self esteem as wordsworth would have been ridiculous ; in his case with the undoubted genius that was in the man it was something almost heroic.
(c) In spite of this self obsession he is curiously deficient in the purely lyrical gift. He cannot leap into the ether like Shelley.

The Romantic Movement the Romantic Age

Important themes

of the early 19th was a reaction to many cultural, social and political developments. Many artists and thinkers began to see developments in society threatening individualism: the factory system made human beings replaceable parts in a system, and mass political movements (like the French Revolution) diminished individual accomplishment. Similarly, increased urbanization made people feel cut off nature. Also, Neoclassicism's strict rules and formalism began to seem limiting.
In reaction, the Romantic Movement stressed the individuality of the artist's expression, a personal relationship with nature, and a trust in emotion and subjective experience.
Since classical times artists had attempted to achieve mimesis, a faithful recreation of the world. Romantic artists, however, felt no obligation to depict the world mimetically. Rather, they sought to express their personal vision.
As a result, Romantic form could be open-ended. Poems might conclude without clear resolution; music could be highly personal and emotional. The Romantic artist was in many ways an outsider of society, a person who followed his or her own vision while continuously creating new works that expressed an evolving self.

Important philosophical figures:

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): Kant is not a Romantic philosopher, but his ideas, especially his Pure Critique of Reason, influenced many Romantic thinkers. Essentially, Kant was interested in how we can know that the world we experience is real and not just the product of our minds. He concluded that we can never be fully certain about the world outside of our minds, but we can be somewhat more certain about the categories our minds impose upon the world. Kant was skeptical about the idea of the self, but Romantic thinkers seized on the idea that the individual mind could play a role in ordering, shaping and imposing meaning on the world.

Jean-Jacque Rousseau (1712-1778): a French writer whose work celebrated his own personality and intellect. Rousseau's essays and his autobiographical Confessions were written during the Enlightenment, but they challenged Enlightenment ideals. He thought human beings were more moral before they were corrupted by the influences of civilization. Thus, he prized childhood, imagination and a primitive relationship to nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882): an essayist and thinker whose influential writings shaped American literature and popular ideas about nature and individualism. Emerson wrote his great essay "Nature" in 1836. In it he posited that human imagination was limited by too much reliance on the ideas of the past. Instead, Emerson urged his readers to explore themselves through self-reflection in nature and "sallies of the spirit." He called his ideal person "Man-Thinking", a term that reflected his belief in an ever changing self.

Important literary figures:

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834): English Romantic poets whose Lyrical Ballads (1798) revolutionized poetry by using common language, natural imagery, and an emphasizing the poet's own perceptions.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832): an influential German Roma writer whose novel The Sorrows of Young Werther expressed his dissatisfaction with the neoclassical ideals of order, rationalism and science. Goethe's play Faust depicts the struggle of humanity to balance poetic passions with the dictates of reason. In his old age, Goethe became a much-revered sage.

Trends in Architecture:

The Romantics prized originality above all else, so it isn't surprising that they didn't like neoclassical architecture with its echoes of Greek and Roman models. They did, however, admire Gothic architecture with its intricate and often irregular tracery, spires and pinnacles. The British Houses of Parliament were rebuilt in the 1830s in a neo-gothic style. Such structures evoked a Romantic view of the past as mysterious, idealistic, and emotional.

Important Musical figures:

Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827): a German-born composer whose work spans the shift from the Enlightenment to the Romantic era. His early work reflected the neoclassical style of Haydn. By 1800, however, Beethoven had become almost deaf, a condition that provoked thoughts of suicide. Rather than kill himself, he began composing a series of highly emotional and dramatic symphonies. In the last 12 years of his life, he wrote work of great complexity and passion. Indeed, Beethoven's music embodies the "sense of personal becoming" that typifies Romantic art.
Giuseppi Verdi (1813-1901): Italy's greatest composer of romantic operas. His music epitomizes passion, power and energy, and his melodies express the emotions of his characters. Among his operas-many of which are still performed-are Aida, Rigoletto, La Forza Del Destino, Otello andLa Ballo in Mashere.
Richard Wagner (1813-1883): a German composer whose operas emphasize the blind forces of irrationality that influence human behavior. His characters are often made unhappy by fate or uncontrollable events. Influenced by Beethoven, Wagner sought to arouse his audience's emotions with stirring and heroic music. He also sought to find serious material for his librettos (an opera's story). His Ring Cycle comprises a series of operas that depict Norse mythology.

Concluding remarks:

Scholars debate the definition of Romanticism. And I won't attempt to provide a final articulation here. Suffice to say, it was a wide-ranging cultural phenomenon that influenced the visual arts, philosophy, literature, music and politics. There were, one might argue, Romanticisms rather than a single coherent version, yet it is possible to speak broadly about some of the central themes and tendencies common to the movement.
Romanticism was in some ways a reaction to the 18th century. That century, also known as the age of reason, had witnessed a series of prolonged attacks on many fronts to the idea of an individual self. During these years, for example, Europe underwent rapid industrialization. This in turn created socioeconomic changes that shifted the population from a rural, agrarian way of life to a more depersonalized urban lifestyle. Consequently, people became distanced from nature. In addition, large-scale mechanized industries sprang up and changed the character of work. The factory system with its regimented hours and mindless repetition seemed to make human beings mere interchangeable parts in an impersonal process.
The 18th Century also saw the rise of radically skeptical philosophers who doubted the very existence of an individual self. The philosopher David Hume argued that the self Descartes believed himself to have found was only a product of cultural situatedness, and the German philosopher Imannuel Kant saw the self as an empty fiction accompanying on-going thought.
In the face of these social and philosophical attacks, Romantic writers, philosophers and artists tried to reassert the importance of the self. Their art and criticism focused on self-analysis and self-reflection. They went inward to examine the human mind's relationship to the world. Oddly, even though he was not a Romantic philosopher, Kant's ideas about consciousness, especially his Pure Critique of Reason, influenced many Romantic thinkers.
Kant had been interested in how we can know that the world we experience is real and not just the product of our minds. As you may recall, this problem also concerned Descartes. In the end, Kant concluded that we could never be fully certain about the reality of the world outside of our minds. He did think, however, that we could be somewhat more certain about the categories our minds tended to impose upon the world.
Romantic thinkers like Emerson seized on this idea because it seemed to suggest that the individual mind does play a role in ordering, shaping and imposing meaning on the world. From Plato to Kant, one important goal for philosophers had been to describe the nature of the reality that we inhabit but cannot agree upon. The Romantics, however, saw the problem differently. They were not trying to grasp what was really out there. Rather, they sought to express the power of the individual mind to give shape to what was out there. In short, they wanted to put the "self" back in the driver's seat. Nature for them was a set of building blocks for the creative mind. Through it, the individual expressed his will and unique being.
As a result, nature became an important focus of Romanticism, but not in its naturalistic or scientific sense. Indeed, one important idea to keep in mind while reading Emerson is that the word "Nature" has more than one meaning. Commonly we use it to mean the external world in its entirety: trees, rocks, mountains, the ocean. But we also use the word to mean the inherent character or basic disposition of a person. For example, we might say, "It's just not in his nature to lie."
For Emerson, nature comprises both of these meanings simultaneously. Thus the forest or the mountainside exist, but they have no meaningful existence without a person's individual nature to behold them. In the end, Emerson argued, human consciousness is the giver of meaning to nature. It is our mind, our thoughts, and our imagination that are forever creating the meaning of this world
Emerson's "transparent eyeball" represents the thin, permeable membrane between the external world in its entirety (the NOT ME) and the inherent personal nature of the human being who perceives it (the ME). What's tragic, in Emerson's view, is that so many people get locked into only one way of viewing the world. They fail to realize that they are radically free to re-envision the world's meaning, for nature is at once their own being and a playground for their creative minds.
Romantics also tended to rebel against social conformity and the rising industrialism that seemed to make individuality insignificant. They often identified with the outsider or anti-hero, a figure like Icarus, the mythological Greek boy who flew too close the sun. In the Romantic era, the hero was often the one who asserted his or her individuality by going against the prevailing order even if this rebellion proved futile.
But it is overly simplistic to say that Romanticism began around 1800, or that it was merely a reaction to neoclassicism. In many ways, the opposition of feeling to intellect, clarity to impressionism, form to expression, and nature to civilization echo earlier cultural debates. Yet the birth of a self-conscious Romanticism does mark a turning point in many ways.
We can still see elements of the Romantic Movement in society and culture today. In many ways, the rock star is a type of Romantic hero living outside of social norms and asserting individuality at all costs. Indeed, bands like Rage Against the Machine or The Insane Clown Posse echo the Romantic themes of rebellion and dissent. Moreover, white middle class kids who play rap music may feel that its messages of defiance and anger speak to them with more passion and authenticity because they are sallies against a dominant and conformist culture. Thus we are all to one degree or another still Romantics, or at least familiar with Romanticism's themes of freedom, individual assertion and the desire for a more real, more authentic way of life Novels of the Romantic Age