IFEP Phonetics

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blogspot posting does not accept ipa font. I have displayed a copy on the notice board. Another copy is on my table.Those who wish to have a photocopy may do so.

All the best! Create

Two Old Men : I BCom D

The Two Old Men

Leo Tolstoy’s story, Two Old Men, deals with Elisha Bodrov and Efim, two old Russians and their pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The two set out on their much-awaited journey with initial hick ups. They pass through a number of villages and witness extreme conditions of human living. In one village Efim stays back to nurse a sick and dieing family back to health and in the process loses all his money. Unable to proceed further due to lack of money he returns, but with a sense of fulfilment. Elisha manages to visit the holy shrines but comes back without peace of mind.

The simple story is steeped in Christian ethos. One can read the teachings of Christ in the story: of helping the neighbours, seeing god in the fellow human being, doing the will of god than chanting his name, helping the needy, honesty and so on.

PS If you wish to post some comments, pose questions you are welcome.

A Noiseless Spider

A Noiseless Spider

Pointers

The spider which is a subject in the first paragraph becomes metaphor in the second paragraph. It turns out to be the metaphor for the contemplation of poet’s own soul in search of connection with the divine (over soul) The common physical experience of watching a spieder weave its web, transforms into a spiritual one in the second stanza, typical of Walt Whitman. Note that the soul does not require the usual channels of pristocracy to reach the oversoul. It has to find its own channels. In addition, each soul must also find its own way of connecting. Transcendental philosophy to which Whitman subscribed to believed in intuitive knowledge/ability in reaching the divine/over soul.

PS: IF you wish to post some material in the comment section you are welcome. Your questions comments are also welcome.

Certificate Course in SEmiotics

Department of Media Studies

Christ College, Bangalore

Announces

Certificate Course in Semiotics

By

Dr William R Da Silva

Dept of Mass Communication (PG Section)

Duration : 16 Hours

Dates : 10 – 20 February (Mon- Fri)

Time : 04.15 pm to 6.30 pm

Venue : Media Studies Lab

(Block II, Room 121)

For more details Contact: Anil Pinto, 9845891933

Semiotics: Semiotics is the science of signs. It deals with not only with the ‘explicit systems of communication such as language, the Morse Code, and traffic signs and signals but also a great diversity of human activities and productions – our bodily postures and gestures, the social rituals we perform, the clothes we wear, the meals we serve, the social ritual we perform, the clothes we wear, the meals we serve, the buildings we inhabit, the objects we deals with’, movies, advertisements and literature all of which function in diverse kinds of signifying systems.

The course will give a theoretical understanding of Semiotics and help the participants make semiotic analysis of cultural productions.

Dr William R Da Silva: Born in Mangalore taught at St Joseph’s Seminary, Mangalore, Mangalore University, Goa University, University of Hamburg, Germany, Osnabrook University, Germany, Manipal Institute of Communication, Manipal. He was also on the staff seminar of London School of Economics. His academic work and research spans over Theology, Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology, Literature, Linguistics, Translations, Communication and Media. He has written and translated over 40 books. Konkanni Bible translated from Original Hebrew and Greek is his magnum opus. It happens to be the only bible translated from original tongues in the Konkanni language. He has a rare feet of working on 16 languages. Currently he is the Director of Sandesha School of Konkanni Studies, Mangalore, Senior Professor, Dept of Communication (PG), Christ College, Bangalore, and Visiting Professor, Osnabrook University, Germany.

II Sem BBM MIdsem exam pattern

Christ College, Bangalore

I BBM

II Semester

English

Time: 2hrs Max. Marks: 50

Part A

I. Answer any TWO questions in about 400 words. 2x10=20

Two out of four

II Answer any FOUR of the questions in about 200 words. 4x5=20

Four out of five

Part B

III. Paragraph writing 2x5=10

All Questions Compulsory

--------------------------------------------------------

Portion:

The First Meeting: Sujata Bhatt

Fuelled: Marcie Hans

I have a dream: Martin Luther King

Those People Next Door: A G Gardiner

Asleep : Earnst Jandl

Paragraph Writing

I FEP II Sem Mid Sem exam pattern

Christ College, Bangalore

I BA

II Semester

Applied Phonetics II

Time: 2hrs Max. Marks: 50

I. Transcribe the following words and mark the stress ½x20=10

II. Transcribe the following words and mark their syllable division ½x10=10

III. Rewrite the underlined words in the following sentences and mark the stress according to their function. ½x10=10

IV. Transcribe the following sentences, underline the weak forms and divide the tone groups and mark the intonation. 10x2=20

Hi. All.
You have an essay type question on The Guide and a few short notes. To answer these questions you need to know concepts like modernity and colonialism, post colonialism. At least you should know what is modernity. I have posted a short write up on modernity. Please read and try to understand it. If you apply that explanation to what happens to and in Malgudi you have your answer.

There are also questions on Women’s writing in India by Susie Taru and K Lalitha and ‘Politics of Failure’ by SV Srinivas. I am posting my notes on ‘Politics of Failure’ on the blog. (Vicky, III FEP) typed them for you). My 12-page notes no Women’s writings was typed by Neha Doshi of I FEP but the floppy she gave me the material in doesn’t open. Let me try it again. However, I am leaving two photocopies of that notes on my table you may pick it photocopy and leave it back on my table for others to use. But I must warn you about my handwriting. Reading the manuscript can be injurious to your eyes and brain!

All the best gals and guys!

PS: Very sorry for the delay in posting. I had promised, esp. Shashank to put up the posting by 9 am. Due to the virus threat College has closed the net. I had to search for a cyber cafe. Posting now from Cyber cafe.

Modernity:
Modern, Modernism, Modernity: All these are different concepts. Modern at one level can be used as against traditional. For example: modern house. However, this concept can keep changing. A modern house today may become ancient, old, traditional 25-50 years from now.
Modernism was a reactionary movement especially in the realm of literature, art, architecture that occurred in the early 20 century. It radically questioned the traditional social organisation, morality and traditional concept of human self. E.g. Freud offers a new insight into human self as id, ego, and superego and unravels the libidinal self. Talks of the conscious and subconscious. This conception of man is different from the way religion or the evolution theory gave. DH Laurence talks to new sexual morality unknown to the west. Modernism was a reaction to modernity led by rationalism, scientific thinking etc.

Modernity: modernity was an outlook or frame of mind/thinking shaped by the rapid development in urbanisation, industrialisation, unprecedented development in science and technology that began in the eighteenth century. This is also called enlightenment thinking. Some of the important features of Enlightenment - liberal humanism, rationalism, belief in natural law, deep faith in scientific and technological progress, and linear and evolutionary understanding of history. (Liberal Humanism that we talk about in ‘Politics of Failure’ is a fall out of Enlightenment. The intellectual response or reactionary thinking fostered by enlightenment is Modernity.

Difference between Enlightenment and Modernity: Enlightenment is a philosophical or intellectual movement. Where as modernity is how enlightenment physically manifests in reality. E.g. When the British came to India they came with enlightenment philosophy which believed in rationalism etc (refer to the features of enlightenment mentioned in the previous paragraph) because of that modernity entered India. E.g. Urbanisation, happened, a linear history based on the western model was written which began with the so called Vedic period and ended with the British rule which said from the Vedic period to the British period history has been progressing, evolving. India has been gradually developing and so on. (Many of even today hold these beliefs)

Anil Pinto, Dept of Media Studies, Christ College, Banglaore

Politics of Failure

POLITICS OF FAILURE
S. V Srinivas
-Liberal humanist project of English Departments of elite institutions
-Liberal humanism: A cultural – political position holding up the essential decency of human beings and which promotes democracy, individualism, tolerance, rationality. It glosses over inequalities and differences which are the result of socio-cultural conditions
-Theses English depts exclude and marginalise various categories – of people of texts, of theories. E.g.: for discrepancy between liberal, rhetoric and teaching practice : high failure rate in English courses especially SCST students
- High failure, high dropout converges of two histories :
English in colonial + post colonial India
Post independence education policies
Hence fostere elitism at the expense of primary education
-Purpose of Colonial English education-to create a small class of intermediaries who would then educate the ‘masses’ in the vernacular
-Power + prestige of English created academics and bureaucratic elite
-Postcolonial India. Eng still marker of privilege
-Accessibility to higher education has not increased for people. Governments have perpetuated this condition
-1986 education policy created rural elite
-Much of higher education funding by government goes to central universities
-English language available only to ‘exclusive public schools’ not govt schools.
-As a result Higher education is available only to those not compelled by their economic situation to seek employment
-Present system based on limited accessibility to higher education- compared to the number of students possessing minimum qualification. M.A 50% + required + toppers in entrance test. All this truly selects meritorious students.
-Limited access higher education, ‘merit and excellence’ of individual students + ‘high standards’ of institution a suspect. It shifts states responsibility of its failure in making education more widely available to disadvantaged students. The latter are blamed for their ‘lack of competence’ or lack of interest. In the process, government is absolved of blame for its inadequacy but seen as engaged in positive task of promoting talent and higher standards.
-SC/ST reservation rendered useless by insistence on high standards + hostility of upper class teachers and their administration.
-Obstruction offered to the acquisition of ‘knowledge’ in the discipline by using alienating texts and uncongenial classroom methods. This closes several career options to disadvantaged students like faculty positions. Reserved quota not filled due to non-availability of candidates. This keeps higher education in bureaucratic hands.
-Successful students are to take the blame. The investment is constant despite strength. Successful students internalise the institutions version of individuals excellence and merit and categorise the unsuccessful as ‘uninterested’ or ‘lacking in initiative’
-Legitimate demands of the adversely affected students ignored and few attempts are made to find workable solutions to the problem.
-To break the cycle of exclusion and domination, thus characterises failure. Student should make a sustained intervention.
-Change from within by students who resist authoritarian pedagogies+ teachers of administrators who have to resist their own will to power.
-Shouldn’t our nation prosper.
-Failure not ‘natural’ because of lack of interest but ‘politics’(-power struggle)
-Elitism

Anil Pinto

AnilPinto: Christ college photo

AnilPinto: Christ college photo

testing testing

III FEP/JPE Interaction with Abhay Simha from FTII

Those were the best days of my life?

Christ college photo

HI All
Wanna see Christ College frozen in a pic. Have a looks

III JPEng, FEP notice

Notice to III FEP and JPEng Students

The remaining essays will be taken up in the following order.

The Politics of Failure - 1 hr
On the Abolition of the (sic) English Department - 1 hr
Minutes on Indian Education - 1 hr
Interrogating the Post-Colonial 2 hr
Shall We Leave it to the Experts 2 hrs
Why I am not a Hindu - 1 hr
Marxist Criticism - 3 hrs

All classes will be lecture-cum-discussion based. Hence, please come to class having read the essays.
04.Jan 2006

II BCom 'A' IV Sem Assignment

IV Semester CIA Assignments
II BCom A

CIA-3: Topic: English spoken in Christ College Campus. The analysis may be based on usage, preferred words, slangs, accents, mannerisms that go with certain expression, expressions, mother tongue influences, pronunciation etc.

Evaluation Criteria: Quality of the analysis, presentation, language, creativity.
Date for submission: January 12, 2006

Guidelines for Submission:
• All students should post it on my blog http://anilpinto.blogspot.com A hard copy of the assignment may also may be submitted.
• Please post your assignments at the end of your assignment notice on the blog. Please sign in as anonymous. Remember to type your Full Name, Register No and date of posting.
• The covering sheet of the hard copy assignment should have the following details: Name of the college, assignment code, assignment title, your name, Reg. no, name of the teacher in-charge and date of submission.
• You may use pictures, graphs and illustrations. Please write only on one side of the A4 size paper.
• You are free to take the assignment beyond the expected criteria. Such efforts will be appreciated.
• Do not submit the assignments prior to the date of submission unless you are going to be out of town
• Late submissions will be rejected.
• Avoid copying.
• Remember to give the reference at the end of your assignment of the books, articles and websites that you have referred to. The following pattern may be followed: Author’s name with the last name first, a period, name of the book underlined, a period, Place of Publication, colon, name of publication, year of publication, page no.
o E.g.: Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, My Experiments with Truth, New Delhi: Penguin, 1998.
o In case of a website give the complete URL of the site referred to.
o If you are directly lifting some lines quote them. If you are using some idea write it in your words but acknowledge it.

Feminism

Feminist Criticism


Feminism is a diverse collection of social theories, political movements, and moral philosophies, largely motivated by or concerning the experiences of women, especially socially, politically, and economically. As a social movement, feminism largely focuses on limiting or eradicating gender inequality and promoting women's rights, interests, and issues in society.

Feminism as a self-aware, concerted approach entered literature in 1960’s. However about two centuries of struggle preceeds it. Beginning with Mary Wollsonecrafts – A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), Margaret Fuller (Am)- Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), John Stuart Mill – The Subjection of Women (1869)

Today feminist literary criticism closely linked to movement by political feminists for social, economic and cultural freedom and equality.

Virginia Woolf novelist, an important precursor feminist criticism, wrote numerous essays on women authors and on the cultural, economic, and educational disabilities within ‘patriarchal’ society that have prevented women from realising their creative possibilities. Her important work: A Room of One’s Own (1929)

Simone de Beauvoir (French) in her The Second Sex (1949) presents a critique of cultural identification of women merely as negative object or other to ‘man’ as the defining and dominating ‘subject’ who is assumed to represent humanity in general. She also dealt with great collective myths of women in the works of many male writers.

In US modern feminism began with Mary Ellman’s Thinking about Women (1968) through witty discussion of derogatory stereotypes of women in literature written by men. She also presented alternative, subversive points of view in some writings of women.

Kale Millets – Sexual Politics (1969)- ‘Politics’ – mechanisms that express and enforce the relations of power in society. She discussed how western social arrangements and institutions as covert ways manipulating power to establish and perpetuate the dominance of men and subordination of women. She attacked the male bias in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and analysed selected passages by D H Lawrence showing how they aggrandise their aggressive phallic selves and degrade selves and degrade women as submissive sexual objects.

Since 1969 there has been explosion of feminist writings unparalleled in the previous history of critical innovation as it displays urgency and excitement of a religious awakening. However, there is no unitary theory of procedures in US, England and France and other countries. There is a lot of variety like psychoanalytic, Marxist and diverse post-structuralist with intense debate within them. Various feminism share assumptions and concepts that constitute common ground for the diverse ways that individual critics explore the factor of sexual differences and privilege in the production, the form and content, the reception and critical analysis and evaluation of works of literature.
o Subtypes of feminism
o Amazon feminism
o Anarcha-Feminism
o Anti-racist feminism
o cultural feminism
o ecofeminism
o equity feminism
o existentialist feminism
o French feminism
o gender feminism
o individualist feminism (also known as libertarian feminism)
o lesbian feminism
o liberal feminism
o male feminism or men's feminism
o Marxist feminism (also known as socialist feminism)
o material feminism
o pop feminism
o post-colonial feminism
o postmodern feminism which includes queer theory
o pro-sex feminism (also known as sexually liberal feminism, sex-positive feminism)
o psychoanalytic feminism
o radical feminism
o separatist feminism
o socialist feminism
o spiritual feminism
o standpoint feminism
o third-world feminism
o transnational feminism
o transfeminism
o womanism
o Certain actions, approaches and people can also be described as proto-feminist or post-feminist.


Common grounds:
1. Western civilisation is pervasively patriarchal – It is male centred, controlled, organised, conducted to subordinate women to men in all cultural domains: familial, religious, political, economic, social, legal, artistic.

Hebrew Bible, Greek philosophy to present: female defined by negative reference, to the male as the human norm hence the other, non-man, by her lack of the identifying male organ, of male powers, and of the male characters traits presumed to have achieved the most important inventions and works of civilisations and culture.
Women socialised to resign to patriarchal ideology (conscious and unconscious presuppositions and male superiority) and conditioned to derogate their own sex and to cooperate in their own subordination. E.g. NDTV ‘We the People’ Dress code.

2. Though sex is determined by anatomy the prevailing concepts of gender- of the traits that constitute what is masculine and what is feminine are largely cultural constructs. Created by the patriarchal biases of the civilisation. Simone de Beauvoir: ‘One is not born, but becomes, a woman … it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature…. which is described as feminine.’
Masculine identified as active, dominating, adventurous, rational, creative; the feminine by systematic opposition to such traits, as passive, acquiescent, timid, emotional, and conventional.

3. The patriarchal/masculinist /andro-centric ideology pervades great literary works mostly written by men. Highly regarded classics focus on male protagonists- Oedipus, Ulysses, Hamlet, Tom Jones, Captain Ahab, Huck Finn- embody masculine traits and ways of feeling and pursue masculine interests in masculine fields of action.

To them female characters are marginal and subordinate, complementary, opposite to masculine desires and enterprises. They lack female role models, are addressed to male readers. They either make woman alien outsider or make her take the position of the male subject, male values, and ways of perceiving, feeling, and acting. Critical theories, traditional aesthetic categories presumed to be objective, disinterested and universal are fused with masculine assumptions, interests and ways of reasoning. Rankings, critical treatments are gender-based.

Feminist critics in English-speaking countries attempt to reconstitute all the ways we deal with literature to do justice to female points of views, concerns and values.
They try to alter ways of reading of the past to make her a Resisting Reader (Judith Fetterley, 1978) to resist the author’s intensions and design in order by a ‘revisionary reading’ bringing to light and countering the sexual biases written into a literary work. To find ‘images of women’ in the novels and poems of men. They fall into two antithetic patterns. One side- idealised projection of men’s desires (the Madonna, the Muse of arts, Dante’s Beatrice, the pure and innocent virgin, the ‘Angel in the House’ that was represented by the Victorian poet Coventry Patmore). The other side: demonic projections of men’s sexual resentments and terrors (Eve and Pandora as the sources of all evil, destructive sensual temptresses such as Delilah and Circe, the malign witch, the castrating mother)
Though some decry literature written by men for its depiction of women as marginal docile and subservient to men’s interests and emotional needs and fears, male writers like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Samuel Richardson, Henrick Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw have managed to raise above the sexual prejudices of their time sufficiently to understand and present the cultural pressures that have shaped the characters of women and forced upon them their negative or subsidiary social roles.

Some feminists are not concerned with woman as reader but gynocriticism. Gynocriticism: Elaine Showalter- criticism concerns itself with developing specifically female framework for dealing with works written by women in terms of production, motivation and analysis, interpretation in all literary forms, including journals and letters.

Important books of this mode:
Patricia Meyer Spacks: The Female Imagination (1975), on major women novelists and poets in England, America, and France;
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (1977)
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) Stresses the psychodynamics of women writers in the 19th century.

The authors propose the ‘anxiety of authorship’ that resulted from the stereotype, that literary creativity is an exclusive male domain, effected in women writers a psychological duplicity that projected a monstrous counter figure to the heroine, typified by Bertha Rochester, the madwoman Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre; such a figure is ‘usually in some sense the author’s double, an image of her own anxiety and rage’.

Concerns of gynocritics-
1. to identify distinctively feminine subject matters in literature written by women – The primary issues e.g. the world of domesticity, the special experiences of gestations, giving birth, and nurturing or mother-daughter and woman-woman relations- in which personal and affectional issues, and not external activism is significant.

2. To uncover in literary history a female tradition expressed by a subcommunity of women writers who were aware of, emulated and found support in earlier women writers, and who in turn provide models and emotional support to their own readers and successors.

3. To show that there is a distinctive feminine mode of experience or ‘subjectivity’ in thinking feeling, valuing and perceiving oneself and the outer world.

4. To attempt to specify the traits of a ‘woman’s language or distinctively feminine style of speech and writing, in sentence structure, types of relations between the elements of a discourse, and characteristic figures and imagery.

Some feminists critically analyse women’s domestic and ‘sentimental’ novels, noted perfunctorily and in derogatory fashion in standard literary histories. These dominated the market for fiction and best sellers in the nineteenth century.
Examples seen in Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (1977) on British writers
Nina Baym Woman’s fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America 1820-1870 (1978)
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (2 Vols; 1988-89)

Often-asserted role of feminist critics is to enlarge and reorder, displace the literary canon- a set of works which by a cumulative consensus have come to be considered ‘major’ as the chief subjects of literary history, criticism, scholarship, and teaching.

Feminist studies have brought to forefront many of the sidelined women writers: Anne Finch, George Sand, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, Christina Rossetti, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn Lady, Mary Wortley Montagu, Joanna Baillie, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a number of African-American writers such as Zora Neale Hurston.

Some feminists have concentrated on lesbian writers.


American and English critics have engaged in empirical and thematic studies of writings by and about women. In France prominent critics have occupied themselves with the ‘theory’ of the role of gender in writing within the poststructuralist frame of reference, Lacan’s reworkings of Freudian psychoanalysis in terms of Saussure’s linguistic theory.

English-speaking feminists show demonstrable and specific evidences in which male bias is encoded in our linguistic conventions. E.g. ‘man’, ‘mankind’ for human beings, chairman or spokesman for people of either sex, he and his to refer back to gender neutral nouns like God, human being, child inventor, author, poet.

French feminists argue that all western languages are irredeemably male-gendered, male-constituted and male-dominated. According to Lacan Discourse is ‘phallogocentric’- It is centred and organised throughout by implicit recourse to the phallus (symbolic) both as its supposed ‘logos’ or ground, and as its prime signifier and power-source. Phallogocentrism manifests itself in Western discourse not only in its vocabulary and syntax, rigorous rules of logic, proclivity for fixed classifications and oppositions, and its criteria to choose valid evidence and objective knowledge. The basic problem for French theorists is to establish the very possibility of a woman’s language that will not, when a woman writes, automatically be appropriated into this phallogocentric language for such appropriation forces her into complicity with the linguistic features that impose on females a condition of marginality and subservience, or even of linguistic non-entity.

To evade this dilemma, Helene Cixous posits the existence of an incipient ‘feminine writing’ with its source in the mother, in that stage of the mother-child relation before the child acquires the male-centred verbal language. Thereafter, this prelinguistic potentiality in the unconscious manifests undermine and subvert the fixed signification, the logic, and the ‘closure’ of our phallocentric language, and open out into a joyous freeplay of meanings.

Luce Irigaray posits a ‘woman’s writing’ which evades the male monopoly and the risk of appropriation into the existing system by establishing as its generative principle, in place of monolithic phallus, the diversity, fluidity and multiple possibilities inherent in the structure and erotic functioning of the female sexual organs and in the distinctive nature of female sexual experiences.

Julia Kristeva posits a ‘Chora’, or prelinguistic, pre-oedipal, and unsystematized signifying process, centred on the mother, that she labels ‘semiotic’. This process is repressed as we acquire the father-controlled, syntactically ordered, and logical language that she calls ‘symbolic’. The semiotic process can break out in a revolutionary way as in avant-garde poetry, whether written by a women or by men- as a ‘heterogeneous destructive causality’ that disperses the authoritarian ‘subject’ that strikes free of the oppressive order and rationality of our standard discourse which as the product of the ‘law of the Father’ consigns women to a negative and marginal status.

In recent years a number of feminists have used poststructuralist positions and techniques to question the founding concepts of feminism itself. They point out the existence of differences and adversarial strands within the supposedly monolithic history of patriarchal discourse, and emphasise the inherent linguistic instability in the basic conceptions of ‘woman’ or ‘the feminine’ as well as the diversities within these supposedly universal and uniform female identities that result from differences in race, class, nationality, and historical situation.

The volume of literature both critical and creative as well women’s studies in academia a increasing by the day. The concern with the effects of sexual innovations of the last several decades, the concern with the effects of sexual differences in the writing, interpretation, analysis and assessment of literature seems destined to have the most prominent and enduring effects on literary history, criticism, and academic instruction, as conducted by men as well as women.

Reference:

Abrams, MH. A Glossary of Literary Terms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism