DEADLINE 1 MAY 2009
TIRF (The International Research Foundation for English Language Education) welcomes Doctoral Dissertation Grant (DDG) proposals for 2009. The deadline for submitting a proposal is 1 May 2009. For successful DDG proposals, USD 5,000 is the maximum award. Full information about the requirements can be found at www.tirfonline.org
The DDG funding is intended to support worthy applicants who have advanced to candidacy in their doctoral programs (i.e, have completed their required coursework) and whose dissertation research will address topics which TIRF has prioritized.
This year Doctoral Dissertation Grant (DDG) proposals will be considered on any of the following research priorities topics: (1) the age issue, (2) the proficiency of English language teachers, (3) technology in language learning and teaching, (4) effective grammar instruction, (5) bilingualism and plurilingualism in business and industry, and (6) language assessment.
(We regret that we cannot fund research on other topics at this time.) For full details on what these topics encompass and for information about submitting applications, please visit TIRF's website: www.tirfonline.org
Sunday, March 08, 2009
Monday, March 02, 2009
Welcome Upendra to this blogspace
Dear Readers and Visitors of this Blog,
Upendra Chidilla from Forum on Contemporary Theory, Vadodhara, Gujarat, has joined this blog as a contributor. While I extend him a warm welcome to this space and wish him good luck, I request you to repsond to his posts, as posts in blog sustain only with feedbacks.
Upendra is pursuing his PhD in Philosophy. His posts will largely relate to philosophy.
With Upendra's entry this blog makes a major shift in its long list of experiments. I am curious to know how it will unfold and lead to further experiments.
Anil
Upendra Chidilla from Forum on Contemporary Theory, Vadodhara, Gujarat, has joined this blog as a contributor. While I extend him a warm welcome to this space and wish him good luck, I request you to repsond to his posts, as posts in blog sustain only with feedbacks.
Upendra is pursuing his PhD in Philosophy. His posts will largely relate to philosophy.
With Upendra's entry this blog makes a major shift in its long list of experiments. I am curious to know how it will unfold and lead to further experiments.
Anil
Extracts from 'The Art of T.S. Eliot'
These are a few extracts from “The Art of T.S. Eliot” by Helen Gardner. This might be of use for students who want to know more about the poet and understand the poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and his other works better. This is not from examination point of view but it might be very helpful for that too. Although the book has not been issued from the library since 1997, it is a very interesting book for all those who love literature and its criticism. It is available in the U.G. library of Christ University, Bangalore.
THE ART OF T.S. ELIOT
"Our age with its undigested technical vocabulary, its misuse of metaphor, and its servitude to cliché, cannot be regarded as propitious for a poet. It is a part of Mr Eliot’s greatness as a poet that he has accepted for poetic transformation the idiom of his own day. He has done so deliberately, for he said:
I believe that any language, so long as it remains the same language, imposes its laws and restrictions and permits its own a licence, dictates its own speech rhythms and sound patterns. And a language is always changing; its developments in the vocabulary, in syntax, pronunciation and intonation-even, in the long run, its deterioration- must be accepted by the poet and made the best of. He is turn has the privilege of contributing to the development and maintaining the quality, the capacity of the language to express a wide range, and subtle gradation, of feeling and emotion; his task is both to respond to change and make it conscious, and to battle against degradation below the standards which he has learnt from the past (The Music of Poetry 1942).
Mr. Eliot was from the first a poet with a remarkable range of diction, and with a natural gift for the vividly memorable phrase. He was always consciously aware of the varied resources of English poetic diction and delighted to place an exotic word exactly, or to give us the sudden shock which the unexpected introduction of a commonplace word or phrase can provide. The development in his mature poetry is a development in naturalness: a more ‘easy commerce of old and new’; a mastery of transitions on the large and the small scale, so that change and variety now ‘give delight and hurt not’; and a capacity to employ without embarrassment the obviously poetic word and image. In his earlier poetry he showed a certain distaste for words with poetic associations, which suggested a limitation in his temperament and a certain lack of confidence in his art. Avoidance of the obvious is not the mark of the highest originality of the genuinely bold artist. The change in Mr. Eliot’s poetic style which begins with The Hollow Men in 1925 is accompanied by a change in his metric. The change is the metre is possibly the fundamental change, for it is the new metre that has made possible his new freedom with the language of poetry.
The characteristic metre of Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) is as irregularly rhyming verse paragraphs in duple rising rhythm, with more or less variation in the length of the lines. Rhyme is used as a rhetorical ornament, not as part of a regular pattern; it is decorative and makes for emphasis, but it is not structural. There is, beside the variety in the number of stresses in the line, considerable variety in the amount of co-incidence between speech stress and metrical stresses; but all this we are accustomed to in verse from the seventeenth century onwards."
-From chapter 1-Auditory Imagination.
"Mr. Eliot is, in his own words, ‘occupied with frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail, though meaning still exist’. Mr. Eliot has not at the back of his mind an idea or an argument which could have been expressed quite simply, and which he is purposely disguising. His poems do not begin from an intellectual position, or a truth. They begin with a place, a point in time, and the meaning or the truth is discovered in the process of writing and in the process of reading. Each poem gathers up into itself all that has been said before, and communication becomes easier as the whole poem proceeds.
Part of the difficulty of Mr. Eliot’s early works arose from what he has described himself as ‘an intense and narrow taste determined by personal needs’. this early taste let him to later Elizabethan dramatists for a style of great rhetorical force, and to the French symbolists for a manner that allowed him to express an intensely individual view of life with the minimum of direct statement. The personal need was in his temperament-ironic, diffident, at war with his surroundings; sceptical, preferring understatement, hints and suggestions; fastidious, reserved, acutely sensitive to beauty and ugliness, but even more to misery and happiness. This temperament made the symbolists congenial, for their method of finding an ‘objective correlative’ for emotional states gave him an opportunity to write with a clarity, precision and expressiveness which satisfied his poetic taste, while it allowed him to escape from the lyric poet’s necessity of speaking either for himself or for all men. J. Alfred Prufrock’s love song is neither personal, nor general, though in it the poet expresses a personal vision, and defines what is perhaps a general predicament. The originality, however, lies in the blend of this oblique manner with a highly passionate and dramatic style, which constantly escapes from the region of wit, irony and sensibility into a dramatic intensity if feeling. This tension between treatment and style, which gives the early poetry much of its disturbing power and beauty, was one of the things which made it difficult for the ordinary reader to see what the poet was ‘getting at’. The difficulty, however, lay not only in an unfamiliar manner and an unlimited linguistic daring. A more serious difficulty was the poet’s assumption that his readers could supply from their own experience, and particularly from their reading, what he chose to leave unsaid, or only hint at."
-From chapter 3-Poetic Communication
"In the early poems, as throughout Mr. Eliot’s poetry, images of taste and smell are remarkably frequent. Taste and smell are the most immediate of our senses, and the least translatable into intellectual terms by the conscious mind. They are also the most at the mercy of the external world, for we can avert our eyes, stop our ears and refrain from touching more easily than we can escape a smell which is haunting and pervasive. Such images are natural to a poet whose subject is something ‘beneath both beauty and ugliness’
The question that Mr. Prufrock dare not ask is only superficially the kind of question which one ‘pops’. there is another question all the time which every other question depends on:
Let us go then, you and I, When…………………………talking of Michelangelo.
Why not? One must talk of something and Michelangelo is a cultural topic. The absurdity of discussing his art, in high pitched feminine voices, drifting though a drawing room, adds merely extra irony to the underlying sense of the lines: the escape into nany kind of triviality, implied by the phrase: ‘Let us go make our visit’.
In Mr. Eliot there is a kind of prim pedantry, the pedantry of the New England lecture-room, suggesting not the bar, but the cultured voice and the card-index of the professor. Both works juxtapose boldly a modern world described with the most complete realism, and a world of romance, epic and high tragedy."
-From chapter 4-The Dry Season
"Although all Mr. Eliot’s poetry is the expression of a certain kind of apprehension, the change in his rhythms and style, which has been discussed, and the and the change in his imagery, is the result of a profound change within this apprehension. In the earlier poetry the apprehension is a kind of glass through which he views the world; it is a dark glass through which life is seen with a strange clarity, but drained of colour and variety."
-From chapter 5- The Time of Tension
REFERENCE
Gardner, Helen. The Art of T.S. Eliot. Cresset Press, 1949.
THE ART OF T.S. ELIOT
"Our age with its undigested technical vocabulary, its misuse of metaphor, and its servitude to cliché, cannot be regarded as propitious for a poet. It is a part of Mr Eliot’s greatness as a poet that he has accepted for poetic transformation the idiom of his own day. He has done so deliberately, for he said:
I believe that any language, so long as it remains the same language, imposes its laws and restrictions and permits its own a licence, dictates its own speech rhythms and sound patterns. And a language is always changing; its developments in the vocabulary, in syntax, pronunciation and intonation-even, in the long run, its deterioration- must be accepted by the poet and made the best of. He is turn has the privilege of contributing to the development and maintaining the quality, the capacity of the language to express a wide range, and subtle gradation, of feeling and emotion; his task is both to respond to change and make it conscious, and to battle against degradation below the standards which he has learnt from the past (The Music of Poetry 1942).
Mr. Eliot was from the first a poet with a remarkable range of diction, and with a natural gift for the vividly memorable phrase. He was always consciously aware of the varied resources of English poetic diction and delighted to place an exotic word exactly, or to give us the sudden shock which the unexpected introduction of a commonplace word or phrase can provide. The development in his mature poetry is a development in naturalness: a more ‘easy commerce of old and new’; a mastery of transitions on the large and the small scale, so that change and variety now ‘give delight and hurt not’; and a capacity to employ without embarrassment the obviously poetic word and image. In his earlier poetry he showed a certain distaste for words with poetic associations, which suggested a limitation in his temperament and a certain lack of confidence in his art. Avoidance of the obvious is not the mark of the highest originality of the genuinely bold artist. The change in Mr. Eliot’s poetic style which begins with The Hollow Men in 1925 is accompanied by a change in his metric. The change is the metre is possibly the fundamental change, for it is the new metre that has made possible his new freedom with the language of poetry.
The characteristic metre of Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) is as irregularly rhyming verse paragraphs in duple rising rhythm, with more or less variation in the length of the lines. Rhyme is used as a rhetorical ornament, not as part of a regular pattern; it is decorative and makes for emphasis, but it is not structural. There is, beside the variety in the number of stresses in the line, considerable variety in the amount of co-incidence between speech stress and metrical stresses; but all this we are accustomed to in verse from the seventeenth century onwards."
-From chapter 1-Auditory Imagination.
"Mr. Eliot is, in his own words, ‘occupied with frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail, though meaning still exist’. Mr. Eliot has not at the back of his mind an idea or an argument which could have been expressed quite simply, and which he is purposely disguising. His poems do not begin from an intellectual position, or a truth. They begin with a place, a point in time, and the meaning or the truth is discovered in the process of writing and in the process of reading. Each poem gathers up into itself all that has been said before, and communication becomes easier as the whole poem proceeds.
Part of the difficulty of Mr. Eliot’s early works arose from what he has described himself as ‘an intense and narrow taste determined by personal needs’. this early taste let him to later Elizabethan dramatists for a style of great rhetorical force, and to the French symbolists for a manner that allowed him to express an intensely individual view of life with the minimum of direct statement. The personal need was in his temperament-ironic, diffident, at war with his surroundings; sceptical, preferring understatement, hints and suggestions; fastidious, reserved, acutely sensitive to beauty and ugliness, but even more to misery and happiness. This temperament made the symbolists congenial, for their method of finding an ‘objective correlative’ for emotional states gave him an opportunity to write with a clarity, precision and expressiveness which satisfied his poetic taste, while it allowed him to escape from the lyric poet’s necessity of speaking either for himself or for all men. J. Alfred Prufrock’s love song is neither personal, nor general, though in it the poet expresses a personal vision, and defines what is perhaps a general predicament. The originality, however, lies in the blend of this oblique manner with a highly passionate and dramatic style, which constantly escapes from the region of wit, irony and sensibility into a dramatic intensity if feeling. This tension between treatment and style, which gives the early poetry much of its disturbing power and beauty, was one of the things which made it difficult for the ordinary reader to see what the poet was ‘getting at’. The difficulty, however, lay not only in an unfamiliar manner and an unlimited linguistic daring. A more serious difficulty was the poet’s assumption that his readers could supply from their own experience, and particularly from their reading, what he chose to leave unsaid, or only hint at."
-From chapter 3-Poetic Communication
"In the early poems, as throughout Mr. Eliot’s poetry, images of taste and smell are remarkably frequent. Taste and smell are the most immediate of our senses, and the least translatable into intellectual terms by the conscious mind. They are also the most at the mercy of the external world, for we can avert our eyes, stop our ears and refrain from touching more easily than we can escape a smell which is haunting and pervasive. Such images are natural to a poet whose subject is something ‘beneath both beauty and ugliness’
The question that Mr. Prufrock dare not ask is only superficially the kind of question which one ‘pops’. there is another question all the time which every other question depends on:
Let us go then, you and I, When…………………………talking of Michelangelo.
Why not? One must talk of something and Michelangelo is a cultural topic. The absurdity of discussing his art, in high pitched feminine voices, drifting though a drawing room, adds merely extra irony to the underlying sense of the lines: the escape into nany kind of triviality, implied by the phrase: ‘Let us go make our visit’.
In Mr. Eliot there is a kind of prim pedantry, the pedantry of the New England lecture-room, suggesting not the bar, but the cultured voice and the card-index of the professor. Both works juxtapose boldly a modern world described with the most complete realism, and a world of romance, epic and high tragedy."
-From chapter 4-The Dry Season
"Although all Mr. Eliot’s poetry is the expression of a certain kind of apprehension, the change in his rhythms and style, which has been discussed, and the and the change in his imagery, is the result of a profound change within this apprehension. In the earlier poetry the apprehension is a kind of glass through which he views the world; it is a dark glass through which life is seen with a strange clarity, but drained of colour and variety."
-From chapter 5- The Time of Tension
REFERENCE
Gardner, Helen. The Art of T.S. Eliot. Cresset Press, 1949.
Sunday, March 01, 2009
National Seminar on Representation of the Subalterns
UGC Sponsored National Seminar on
Representation of the Subalterns: Problems And Perspectives
April 3 and 4, 2009.
The seminar is open to the English and the Kannada teachers belonging to the colleges and the universities in
Call for Papers
Delegates are invited to present papers at the seminar focusing on the areas/themes mentioned below:
* The Intellectual and the Subaltern
* Theorising the Other
* Subalterns and Representation
* The Subaltern Agency
* Resistance and Representation
* Essentialising the Subaltern
* Objectifying the Subaltern
* Subaltern and Creative Writings
* Subaltern and the Media
* Subaltern and Visual Representation
* Subaltern and Textual Representation
Each participant will get 15 minutes for presentation and five minutes for discussion.
Last Date for submitting abstracts (of not more than 300 words):
The soft copy may be mailed to: raveendteekay@rediffmail.com
Registration
Participants are required to fill in the registration form and send it to the Co-ordinator by
For more Details Contact: Co-ordinator
Dr.T.K.Ravindran, Head, Dept. of English,
Procedure of Filing an FIR - For women in case of an attack
Dear Readers/Visitors of this Blog,
------------------
As the number of incidents of attack on women are increasing in the city, this document could be a reference for people who are unclear about the procedure to be followed to report the same.In the situation where you witness or are involved in such an incident, please do not hesitate to report it to the Police. These reports can make a lot of difference in helping the Police with putting in place ways to reduce these incidents. It may be noted that at the time of filing an FIR, a large group of people[Say 5-10] accompanying you will make some difference and have some leverage.. The person reporting the incident has to know the Difference between actually filing an FIR and filing a Complaint.. Police often do not record such incidents as FIR but just as a complaint.. An FIR would help consolidate and track such incidents by a higher authority.
Difference between an FIR and a Complaint :
An FIR induces further investigation into the incident [Either by a Magistrate Court or a Higher Court] and a "Police Complaint" is/may be handled locally by the station.
General Procedure of Filing an FIR :
1. Any case which involves an attack on Women will automatically become a Cognizable Offence["Cognizable Case" Means a case in which a Police Officer may in accordance with the first schedule or under another law for the time being in force arrest without a warrant]
2. Certain things that are absolutely mandatory are
a. Incident Date
b. Time of the Incident
c. Place of Occurrence of the Incident
d. Facts related to this
e. Witnesses[If any]
f. Documentation[If any]
g. Description of Assailants[Can be Voice, Height, Build, Clothing Information, anything]
3. The person reporting the incident HAS TO BE willing to identify suspects on being called on a later on date and time.. This should be made known in your FIR.
More Information That You Need To Know :
[These details are present in a Book - Criminal Procedure Code which SHOULD/MUST be available at any police Station]
1. As a person reporting the incident, it would be safer to verify the IPC under which your incident/case is being filed under..
Following are some of the Indian Penal Codes for your Reference :
a. 319 : Hurt
b. 320 : Grievous Hurt
c. 321 : Voluntarily causing hurt
d. 322 : Voluntarily Causing Grievous Hurt
e. 323 : Punishment for voluntarily causing hurt
f. 324 : Voluntarily causing hurt by dangerous weapons or means
g. 326 : Voluntarily causing grievous hurt by dangerous weapons or means
h. 307 : Attempt to Murder
All of the above Codes are well explained in the IPC under the link given below :
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://www.lawzonline.com% 2Fbareacts%2Findian-penal- code%2FIndian-penal-code.html
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?
Welcome Satya to this blogspace
Dear readers and visitors of this blog please welcome Satya Shourie of I year BA - JPEng as a contributor to this blog. She is posting British Literature classnotes here. In fact she has already made a post on Eliot's 'A Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. She is the fourth contributor to this space. All the best Satya.
Nobel Lecture by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1970) - A Write up by Esther Austin
Following is a write up on Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Lecture by Esther Austin of III year PSEng.
------
In the acceptance speech that Solzhenitsyn made when he won the Nobel Prize in 1970, he talks about Art, about what it should be and what it is at the hands of people who use it as propaganda.
What or who is more important, Art or the artists? He says we think we have the power to create Art but Art has the power to recreate us if only we let it do so. And through the power of Art, artists should recreate society. Unfortunately, it is the other way: social and political ideologies force artists to use Art for propaganda to influence the common people and force them to accept such propaganda as artistic truth. In other words, artistic truth is subverted in such situations where Art is not free. We can understand the depth of his concern for Art only when we realize that he is a Russian artist fighting against Communist control of Art and artists.
How do we understand Art? There are two ways of looking at it:
- Here, the artist sees himself as a co-creator of harmonies with God. God is the prime Creator who has given the artist the grace and the ability to create harmonies to uplift the spirit of Man towards God. So, the artist is the link between God and
- Here, the artist sees himself as the supreme creator of an independent spiritual world through Art. He thinks he can change the world through his artistic ideas but, of course, he cannot because he does not have the superhuman power need to create a stable spiritual system. When he fails he blames it on the corrupt ways of society instead of blaming his pride. He does not realize that he does not have power over the mystical or magical component of Art to heal, to correct and to sustain.
The best way to understand Art is to know that it has an inner beauty of conviction. It is a beauty that makes people change their ways and become better human beings. When Dostoevsky said, “Beauty will save the world,” he was talking of this inner beauty of Art and artistic harmony that has the power to make us give up our disharmonious ways and become harmonious as human beings and as a society. This cannot happen with anything else like a political speech, a philosophical system or a social program because all these are made by man whereas Art is inspired by God.
A work of Art stand the test of time only when it is pure; it will not last if it is a vehicle of social propaganda however much it may pretend to express the trinity of Art value: Truth, Goodness and Beauty. “Beauty will save the world” becomes a prophecy when a beautiful work of Art contains Truth and Goodness in it.
In that case, can Literature as a form of Art help the modern world? (Literature is a recent form of Art available in the Modern world ever since writing became a form of expression and a medium of communication.) Solzhenitsyn says he is speaking on behalf of all the writers and particularly Russian writers who have been suppressed. ‘A whole national literature is there, buried without a coffin, without even underwear, naked, with a number tagged to its toe. Not for a moment did Russian Literature cease, yet from outside it seemed a wasteland.’
So, he is speaking on behalf of all those Russian writers who have been suppressed by Communism. What is his responsibility towards them?
Vladimir Solovyov says artists have an obligation to God, ‘But even chained, we must complete that circle which the gods have preordained’.
Artists are the messengers of God. Their conviction to speak from their soul came from their sufferings in prison camps ‘a world in which, while flowing tears rolled down the cheeks of some, others danced to the carefree tunes of a musical.’ The indomitable spirit of man in the face of oppression had to be glorified in the writings of Russians who survived persecution. They were also writing on behalf of the dead.
Though the writing he is talking about is only Russian Literature, it goes beyond the boundary of language and nation. It is the common expression of all writers who write from the heart, as the spokesmen of God. Such writing transcends all barriers of language and culture. It is from the essence of
Though the Modern world is global and the media makes world news available all over the world, people have not come together as one community. ‘On one side, hundreds of mute Christians give up their lives for their belief in God. On the other side of the world, a madman roars across the ocean to FREE US from religion with a blow of steel at the Pontiff.’ We don’t share the same set of values. What seem right to some people is wrong to another set. ‘Given six, four, or even two scales of values, there cannot be one world or one single humanity’.
Who will coordinate these scales of values and how? It is art and literature because ‘literature, together with language protects a nation’s soul’. Fortunately, ‘ingrained in Russian literature is the notion that a writer can do much among his own people – and he must’.
But it has not been easy: the governments suppress freedom of expression, the people are so materialistic that they do not want to protest against it, and the writers themselves cater to the people in power because they do not have the courage to fight for their convictions. If writes become timid what will be the position of the world at large?
Fortunately, there is ‘a keen sense of world literature’, not only in the old sense of literary writings of the world but also in the new sense of world readership. Any book from any part of the world is available in any other part of the world, thanks to the rise of information technology. His own books that were not published in his own country were translated and published and read all over the world. His life was protected only because writers from all over the world had taken notice of his writing and appreciated the quality of his work, and he was recommended for the Nobel Prize. The Nobel Prize was not only for his writings but also an honour to the writers’ organizations that supported him against the policies of his own country to suppress him.
So, what can literature do against the onslaught of violence? Violence cannot succeed for long because it is based on lies. Writers of the world must have the courage to speak the truth because ‘One word of Truth outweighs the World’.
Two articles that moved me today.
Nanda, Meera. 'Witness to a Kidnapping'. The Hindu Magazine. Bangalore. 1 Mar 2009. pp1.
The article criticizes the hollowness of Pinkchaddi campaign and the campaigner's notion of freedom in the background of a kidnap she witnessed in Chandigarh. Let me quote a few lines:
Nanda, Meera. 'Witness to a Kidnapping'. The Hindu Magazine. Bangalore. 1 Mar 2009. pp1.
The article criticizes the hollowness of Pinkchaddi campaign and the campaigner's notion of freedom in the background of a kidnap she witnessed in Chandigarh. Let me quote a few lines:
"Another thing that worries me is the soaring popularity of arranged marriages among the same hip crowd that is so protective (and rightly so) of their right to go to a pub and hold hands in public without the moral police keeping an eye on them.
Most of them, I am sure, will condemn the Chandigarh abduction in no uncertain terms. But I am not sure where they will stand when it comes right down to the heart of the matter — namely, the right of individuals to defy family and community and choose to marry someone from a different caste or creed, especially Islam which is so little understood and so aggressively condemned these days. Will they stand with the woman, or will they stand with the father, not so much to condone the violence but to “understand” why he had to stop the marriage"
The other article is about Writer Workshop of P Lal by Meenakshi Mukherji.
Here, Mukherji sketeches a brief history of Writers' Workshop, a landmark inititative in shaping the literary/intellectual climate in India, locating it in the various debates that mired it.
Note: 1. To read these articles, please click on the article reference given above.
2. Before the readers passionately argue/criticise the views expressed here, I request you to read the articles.
Friday, February 27, 2009
'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'- Lecture Notes
The translation of the extract from the Dante’s Inferno (hell):
"If I thought my answers were to given to anyone who would flame could stand still without moving any further. But since never from this abyss has anyone ever returned alive, if what I hear is true without fear of infamy I answer you."
These words were spoken by a lost soul in the Dante’s Inferno. The condition of that soul and Prufrock is same, for both there is no escape. Prufrock’s condition and the condition of the hell is self induced. The instances are brought about by oneself.
Title
The tile of the poem is ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ the emphasis on the ‘The’ tells us that T.S. Eliot speaks about the love song of everyone in that age i.e. love song of the entire western modernity. It also denotes the singular importance of this poem. It is considered in the poet’s opinion the defining love song- a reflection of what the average western man undergoes during that era.
In the title the first name of the lover is reduced to just initials and the middle name which is usually mentioned in initials is expanded. According to tradition and various cultures the name given to an individual is accompanied by a prominent person’s name, the households name and so on. Alfred was the name of a king at that time hence Prufrock expanded it for importance. Therefore we see that there is actually no identity of his own. This signifies a condition called as trunkage of identity and this stands for a certain crisis. His own identity is reduced to gain the identity of someone who is supposedly much more important than him. Prufrock as a name, on the other hand, reminds of something that is covered, hidden or protected, hence an inability to face circumstances.The title hence connects to the poem.
The poem
‘In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo’
The poet here in these lines has juxtaposed the sublime and ludicrous or ridiculous.
Here Michelangelo is supposed to be sublime.
Michelangelo must be talked about in an intellectual assembly or an artistic assembly.
Artistic assembly is that where persons who know about that particular art come. They all have enough knowledge about that and they come there to enjoy the art and not learn it hence there cannot be any influence or conversion. Whereas in an intellectual meeting there is exchange of ideas thoughts so there can always be a change in your ideas or you might change the ideas of others, hence there is scope for conversions, all the seminars, workshops etc. are hence intellectual assemblies.
But as we look into the poem we see that in the ‘room’ is neither an artistic assembly nor an intellectual assembly hence ludicrous. Hence the juxtaposition of sublime or something great and ludicrous or ridiculous.
Prufrock uses it in his song because he is a hollow man who tries to gain respect and importance by dropping in names to make it sound intellectual.
Also the constant association of women with silliness represents his patriarchal nature and prejudice towards women.
There is also the paradox of Michelangelo being homosexual and women talking about him.
In the second stanza he describes the evening by using the metaphor of a cat. Imageries used here are not at all pleasant as yellow is not supposed to be a pleasant colour and fog is also not pleasant taking into consideration the weather of England where people yearn for sunshine.
The extended metaphor of a cat is used here to describe the fog. This also has a very industrial imagery referring to the soot that falls from the chimney.
The whole imagery in the 2nd stanza is very interesting, there is this cat (fog) who is gets up from its sleep, moves around, there is a lot of action and enthusiasm, and falls back to sleep (Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.). Which shows the state of mind of Prufrock, who gets all active to do something (maybe propose his lover) but finally gives up.
In the third stanza, there is a contrast with Andrew Marvell’s ‘ To his coy mistress’. Andrew Marvell in his poem says there is no time otherwise he could have admired one part of his mistress for a thousand years and hence tries to persuade his mistress to make love with him and not waste anymore time. In contrast to this Prufrock tries to delay things (his proposal) by saying that there will be time ….
On the other hand Biblical reference is also used. ‘there is a time to do everything or for anything to happen there is a fixed time’ is a very spiritual idea. But here he uses it just to delay things.
In the fourth line he says ‘ There will be time, there will be time’, the same thing is repeated two times because he does not have the confidence and wants to buy time by repeating the lines.
Reference:
Pinto, Anil. Class Lecture. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Christ University. Bangalore, India. 25 Feb 2009.
3 March 2009
The poem is about the subconscious and the conscious tension. It is a dramatic monologue with Prufrock’s beloved as the silent listener. The unconscious can also be also be taken as the silent listener here.
As the poet comes to the fourth stanza he is no more talking about where to go, all that is over now. But in the fourth stanza he goes one step back when he is again wondering whether he dared to propose or not. Then again we notice that there is no link between the 2nd and the 3rd lines of this stanza in normal terms as in the French movie called ‘Un Chien Andalou’. From saying “Do I dare?” he immediately turns to saying “Time to turn back and descend the stair”. Its almost as if he was turning back from that question itself. Here, according to me, as Prufrock goes down the stairs, a view from above gives an image of a man walking down the stairs and you can see his head from the top with a bald spot on it. In the lines of this stanza we see that the poet is concerned about his appearance and is not happy with it. He thinks he can make up for his baldness with his dressing. He is almost perfectly dressed but he is still not satisfied as he thinks that the pin that holds the necktie is too simple.
Then again he diverts his question to saying:
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
If you think about it you will realize that disturbing the universe is a major thing, that has rarely happened in the history till now. And this person who cannot ask a girl a simple question talks about disturbing the world! In the next line he is trying to be optimistic by saying that there is time in a minute also, meaning there are so many seconds in a minute, to take decisions and then reversing them again,
“In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse”
In the fifth stanza, there is again a juxtaposition where he measures his life with coffee spoons. Life, which is supposed to be so precious and priceless, he measures it with coffee spoons! Hence the juxtaposition sublime and ludicrous.
From the sixth stanza onwards starts the most painful and disgusting of all imageries. The poet uses synecdoche here, which means a term denoting a part of something is used to refer to the whole thing , or a term denoting a thing (a "whole") is used to refer to part of it , a term denoting a specific class of thing is used to refer to a larger, more general class, a term denoting a general class of thing is used to refer to a smaller, more specific class, or a term denoting a material is used to refer to an object composed of that material.
In the sixth and seventh stanza the poet says he knows the eyes and he knows the arms respectively, which shows that he knows only in part and hence his mind is very fragmented.
“The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
Imagine about hundred eyes fixed on you observing your every move. How would it feel? In the context of the poem it is as if the eyes that look at you make you like a word and fix you somewhere. As Mr. Pinto shared that the first few days of going to a class is very uncomfortable as you are completely new to the students and they want to know you, hence observe you very carefully, if you move right all the eyes move right and if you move left all the eyes move left. Hence he admitted that he used to break the chalk pieces and throw it, maybe out of the window, so that at-least for that time the eyes would be distracted!
You may be thinking that this imagery is not very painful but if you further read on third and fourth lines of the sixth stanza, you could take it as an image of an alive insect in a biology laboratory which is pinned on the wall for the observation of students and he is wriggling on the wall. Wriggling as a word has pain and struggling in itself. He is pinned by the society, observed by them with curiosity and not compassion or sympathy, just curiosity. Then the last two lines of this stanza give an equally or maybe more painful imagery where he talks about the most dreaded kind of vomiting, during which, along with the materials in the stomach the excreta also comes out (butt-ends). It is painful beyond words.
Someone in the class asked Mr. Pinto, that why is it that the poet is using such unpleasant imageries for a supposedly love song. The answer that he gave was, that creativity and sensitivity at that age was so lost that even the love songs, according to the poet, seem to be so unpleasant and almost disgusting.
In the seventh stanza he uses this imagery where he uses artificial aspects and not natural ones (lamplight instead of sunlight). And he is distracted (digresses) by the perfume from a dress and not the presence of the female. In the sixth line of this stanza he uses an image that shows complete inactivity:
“Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.”
In this stanza the poet is portraying Prufrock as an emasculated man without any courage.
In the eighth stanza, at dusk he wants to go and watch the smoke that arises from the pipes of lonely men in whose, shirt-sleeves only he can see leaning out of the windows. At dusk normally people want to watch the sunset and maybe brilliant shades of the sky in the play of light. But this guy wants to watch the smoke rising from the pipe of these anonymous people.
In the ninth stanza:
<blockquote>“I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas”
Here if you try to visualise the imagery and put emphasis on auditory part of the imagery, it can be very disturbing. Here, the poet maybe prefers this painful thing than proposing to his beloved. Maybe that is why is he says that she should have been a pair of ragged claws and so on.
In the tenth stanza time is personified, where he says:
“And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!……”
In this stanza he uses the paradox of having the strength to ‘force the moment to its crisis’. to force a moment to its crisis is something that only God himself can do or maybe the Military heads, hence its a paradox.
From the sixth line onwards he uses the religious imagery. Where saints and prophets used to pray for a decent or a sacred cause this man prays and fasts and even weeps for asking this very simple question (proposing).
He also compares himself with the prophet from the Bible called John- the Baptist. John the Baptist was a man of conviction, and the king of that time, king Herad, feared him. He lived a life of penance without worrying about anything or anybody, not even the king. Hence the comparison of Prufrock with this great man is really ridiculous. Therefore there is a constant use of juxtaposition of something sublime and ludicrous.
Reference:
Pinto, Anil. Class Lecture. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Christ University. Bangalore, India. 3 March 2009
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche
4 March 2009
Eliot was 22 when he wrote the poem, it took him three years to write this poem. Anyone’s writings are a reflection of one’s age. But here we see that being 22, he talks about middle age crisis. It takes a lot to rise above your age and write. This poem is a piece of carefully thought critique of modern industrialisation. This is what primarily Mr. Pinto appreciates in the poem.
In the tenth stanza, ninth line, for the first time the poet tries to be a little honest by saying that he is not a prophet. He almost sees his end in the last two lines of this stanza and is afraid. Here he is probably referring to Emily Dickenson where she has a very pleasant take on death, she says that death comes as a lover to take you away.
In the eleventh stanza he says that when he eventually asks her the question, he might end up regretting it after all. He uses a list of things, again to delay (cups, the marmalade, the tea) . He uses a metaphysical wit here referring to the metaphysical poetry- to have squeezed the universe into a ball, to roll it towards some overwhelming question. Here we see that the question is not a question after all but a statement. He is again comparing himself with something divine. The rising of Lazarus from the dead was something that was always referred by the priests while praying for certain things. And he calls himself Lazarus.
In the end he is so scared that he eventually withdraws the statement immediately.
Reference:
Pinto, Anil. Class Lecture. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Christ University. Bangalore, India. 4 March 2009
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Love Song - Notes
1. Sparknotes
2. Gradesaver Studyguide
3. Analysis 1
4. Review Of The Choice Of Title
5. Critical Analysis - Part 1
6. Critical Analysis - Part 2
7. Critical Analysis - Part 3
8. Free Essays
9. Prufrock's room
10. Influences On Eliot's Poetry (Dante)
11. Commentary
12. Character Analysis (Read All Pages Available)
13. Analysis 2
14. Literary Devices And Themes
15. Eliot and Prufrock's Epiphany
16. Wikipedia
17. Shmoop (Study Guide)
2. Gradesaver Studyguide
3. Analysis 1
4. Review Of The Choice Of Title
5. Critical Analysis - Part 1
6. Critical Analysis - Part 2
7. Critical Analysis - Part 3
8. Free Essays
9. Prufrock's room
10. Influences On Eliot's Poetry (Dante)
11. Commentary
12. Character Analysis (Read All Pages Available)
13. Analysis 2
14. Literary Devices And Themes
15. Eliot and Prufrock's Epiphany
16. Wikipedia
17. Shmoop (Study Guide)
Gender and Technology Reading for IFEP
Following is the link to the reading on Gender and Technology that we discussed in the last two classes. click on the the title below for the reading.
'Gender and Technology' by Nishant Shah
The reading is taken from the Gender and Culture programme offered by Centre for the Study of Culture and Society(CSCS), Bangalore which is offered at Christ University.
Click here to access all the programme readings.
'Gender and Technology' by Nishant Shah
The reading is taken from the Gender and Culture programme offered by Centre for the Study of Culture and Society(CSCS), Bangalore which is offered at Christ University.
Click here to access all the programme readings.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
Workshop on “Perspectives on Caste and Gender in Early India” - Participation Report
National Workshop on “Perspectives on Caste and Gender in Early
Participation Report
A visit to Forum for Contemporary Theory, Vadodhara (erstwhile
I participated in the Thirteenth National Workshop organised by the Forum on Contemporary Theory, Vadodhara during 2-5 February 2009. The general theme of the Workshop was “Perspectives on Caste and Gender in Early India” It was organised around selected textual readings, introductory and public lectures by the faculty and interactive sessions between the faculty and the participants. The workshop was conducted by Kumkum Roy, Professor, Centre for Historical Studies, JNU,
Following is the write up on my expectations I had sent to the organisers
“As the workshop outline points out, a linear and stereotypical history of both caste and gender has been produced, circulated and consumed across academia and media. However, there have been recent alternative positions which challenge such a construction of caste and gender. These challenges, though significant, have not become a part of the mainstream academics. As a result there has been a significant information gap in understating many issues in social sciences in
In specific, from this workshop I wish to know why and how the existing notions about caste and gender came to be constructed the way we perceive them; what social and political needs such constructions served; what necessitated the challenging of the constructions, the nature of newer questions on the constructions, the limitations of such questions, the way ahead; and the modes in which the newer questions could be integrated into the higher education curriculum.”
However, when I landed up at the workshop knowing history as a discipline became one of my primary concerns. Most of my questions throughout the workshop took this trajectory.
A fortnight before the workshop readings were sent to the participants. They included essays by BD Chattopadhyaya, Shereen Ratnagar, Romila Thapar, Aloka Parasher-Sen, Vivekanand Jha, Uma Chakravarthi, Thomas R. Trautmann, Allan Sponberg and Leonard Zwilling.
During the workshop all the participants had to make presentations based on the essays. I spoke on the Cultural Turn in Understanding Early History. In my presentation which primarily focused on the concerns of the first three essays in particular and all the essays in general, I observed Chattopadhyaya’s essay raised questions about the problem of material that historians engaged with early history had to address, and problem of material. My argument was that Chattopadhyaya asked for shifts in both. Ratnagar’s refusal and wholesale rejection of Tanika Sarkar’s work on tribal as the colonial construct was another important observation I made. I also mentioned the general problem in most essays where there was a conscious attempt to unpack the flattened concept of caste but the same attempt was not made in unpacking concepts such as gender, religion or community. In fact they were used quite unproblematically and as flat categories.
One of the crucial points that Kumkum drove home was how caste is studied without any reference to gender in early history, and consequently in other disciplines and the need to engender caste.
The workshop took the participants through the sections of Rig Veda, especially the marriage hymns, the Grihasutras, Manu Smriti, and Jataka Tales to trace the notions of caste and gender. There were also discussions on the structure and craft of these works. The rough age covered was 1500 BCE to 500 CE. In one sense the two concepts were explored both in Sanskrit and Pali or to put it in a problematic way, in Vedic and Buddhist traditions.
I made 26 pages of notes on the five days. And due to paucity of time (thanks to mid-sem evaluation and lecture preparations) I am unable to reproduce important points here, although I very much wish to.
Some of the issues that fascinated me:
- The saptapadi hymn does not occur in Rig Veda but in Yajurveda and not in the context of marriage but in the context of ritual sacrifice.
- Neither in Rig Veda nor Grihasuthras is woman given any equality with man either in rituals or running the household. She is more of means to achieve patriarchal goals.
- The Brahman and Kshatriya categories are not constant in the same hierarchy. In some texts the hierarchy is reversed.
- There are sections of Rigvedic hymns attributed (not conclusively) to women composers (I think it’s 2 and 7 mandala)
- There are multiple notions of Dharma. Different texts have different interpretations, or prescription of dharma. Also, Dharma is not a central term either in vedic or post vedic texts. It gets centrality only in Buddhist texts.
- The Buddhist philosophers called it Dhamma in Pali, which had a different understanding of it.
- Grihasutras only talk of two ashrams- bramacharya and grihasta. The other two get added in Manu Smriti.
- Neither in Rigveda (if my memory serves me right) nor in Grihasutra a girl child is an expected one. The prayers are constantly and only for the blessing of a son –male issue. I had humorously referred to it as ‘crisis of the male child’ during the workshop and wanted to know what could be the reasons for such a crisis. However, in the absence any study in this direction, we could not discuss much.
- The issue of male-male and female-female sexualities in Buddhist texts.
- The struggle within history and among historians working on early history to speak conclusively about the past due to lack of material and lack of corroborative evidence. I only sympathised with them imagining the enormous burden on them of giving a conclusive history which is only an impossibility.
- and many more….
I have benefited immensely from the following three
1. The reading material
2. The two resource persons
3. From the questions and interaction of my fellow participants.
The Forum
The origin and growth of the Forum fascinated me the most. It began as a discussion forum among social science and humanities teachers in MS University,
The Forum perhaps has the best library on theory in
I had nearly an hour and a half-long chat with Prof Kar. For me, he is a model to all the teaching fraternity to become academicians, with life long commitment to build academics, and not look at higher education as mere employment only to be stopped at retirement.
Is such a concept possible? To my mind there are five other such experiments each realised in different ways- CSSS,
To make the best of the journey – Sabarmathi +
Since I reached a day earlier due to limited train facilities, I visited Sabarmathi, which was also a dream come true. Gandhi had stayed here from 1917 to 1930 – the year of Dandi March. I spent nearly four hours going round the house where Gandhi had stayed and the Gandi museum. It was quite a learning experience.
I also visited MS University Fine Arts dept which is ranked no three in the world. It was an amazing experience. I also visited the University library. I found students making use of the library reading room a lot. It was full. But books were hardly updated. We have a far better and updated collection. But their journal section is better than ours.
For library
From Sabarmathi I picked three VCD’s on Gandhi. One of them has Gandhi’s audio. They are available for borrowal in the library. I also bought all the past issues of Journal of Contemporary Thought and quite a few other books. The entire cost coming to Rs 10,000. All of them should be available for borrowal this week.
What do I intend to do with the Workshop
- Use the insights to enrich the syllabi in the dept
- Try and put together the insights/training from this workshop and the Psychology conference on Intimacy and come up with a paper. I wish to work on the notions of intimacy in early texts. I wish to engage with sections of Rig Veda, Grihasutras, Manu Smriti and Buddist texts.
- Use the insights to build my PhD
Gratitude
I am grateful to the Mr Kennedy and Dr Krishnaswami for the permission granted, and the management for partly sponsoring the participation.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
VII THEORY/PRAXIS COURSE
Forum for Contemporary Theory
organises
VII THEORY/PRAXIS COURSE
June 15 – July 11, 2009
Venue: Apostolic Oblates Secular Institute--Spirituality Centre
Manganam, Kottayam, Kerala
For more information click here to visit the Forum website.
organises
VII THEORY/PRAXIS COURSE
June 15 – July 11, 2009
Venue: Apostolic Oblates Secular Institute--Spirituality Centre
Manganam, Kottayam, Kerala
For more information click here to visit the Forum website.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Tips to do better in the exam-given by Mr.Pinto (mainly for 1st year students)
After a 'wonderful' performance..:P....by the 1st year students in the Optional English/British Literature paper, Mr.Pinto gave us a few tips in class to improve our performance in future exams...:).Here they are and I hope they are of some use to all of you!
Cheerz!
P.S.these are all Mr.Pinto's tips and are NOT a figment of my imagination..:)
TIPS:-
A two/three-hour written examination does not test all that you know. It's primary purpose is to test the comprehension of classroom teaching. It wants to evaluate to what extent can the student express what s/he has comprehended. Hence, in an written examination, answer the questions and not the write what you know about a particular area. Formal collegiate examinations are never about testing the overall ability or knowledge of the learner. To that extent the examinations are clearly influenced by behavioral psychology of Skinner and company.
1.Please draw margins in the 5 minutes before the exam. Preferably, 1cm for the left margin,half a centimetre at the top and quarter centimetre each on the right and bottom sides respectively. You may also draw lines after each answer.
2.Begin or end your answers with the question.
3.Quote from the text, on the text. Also, you may argue for/against the author's views and ideas.
4.Write the corresponding question number in the margin (not in the main page) while answering the question and not in serial number order as they WILL result in a loss of marks as such answers do not correspond to the respective question.
5.If you exceed the word limit by 10-15%, marks will be deducted.Therefore, adhere to the word limit.
6.Understand the text and works similar to the text. Formulate ideas and support or argue them.
7.Quote ONLY if you are sure. If you are not sure, do not use the '...'/ "..." symbols.
8.Use single quotes for the titles of poems and essays.In case of the name of a book, novel, play etc., underline the title of the text.
9.Do not quote your teachers in exams. While quoting from somewhere else, preferably written or published sources-site the source.
10.Ensure that you are grammatically correct. A few examples:-
(a)Writing 'English' with a small 'e' tends to bug teachers...:) as it reflects the lack of basic grammar of the language.
(b)Writing 'I' with a small 'i' is NOT acceptable.
11.You cannot use short forms like 'don't', coz, &, and can't. Please use full forms like do not, because, and, and cannot.
Cheerz!
P.S.these are all Mr.Pinto's tips and are NOT a figment of my imagination..:)
TIPS:-
A two/three-hour written examination does not test all that you know. It's primary purpose is to test the comprehension of classroom teaching. It wants to evaluate to what extent can the student express what s/he has comprehended. Hence, in an written examination, answer the questions and not the write what you know about a particular area. Formal collegiate examinations are never about testing the overall ability or knowledge of the learner. To that extent the examinations are clearly influenced by behavioral psychology of Skinner and company.
1.Please draw margins in the 5 minutes before the exam. Preferably, 1cm for the left margin,half a centimetre at the top and quarter centimetre each on the right and bottom sides respectively. You may also draw lines after each answer.
2.Begin or end your answers with the question.
3.Quote from the text, on the text. Also, you may argue for/against the author's views and ideas.
4.Write the corresponding question number in the margin (not in the main page) while answering the question and not in serial number order as they WILL result in a loss of marks as such answers do not correspond to the respective question.
5.If you exceed the word limit by 10-15%, marks will be deducted.Therefore, adhere to the word limit.
6.Understand the text and works similar to the text. Formulate ideas and support or argue them.
7.Quote ONLY if you are sure. If you are not sure, do not use the '...'/ "..." symbols.
8.Use single quotes for the titles of poems and essays.In case of the name of a book, novel, play etc., underline the title of the text.
9.Do not quote your teachers in exams. While quoting from somewhere else, preferably written or published sources-site the source.
10.Ensure that you are grammatically correct. A few examples:-
(a)Writing 'English' with a small 'e' tends to bug teachers...:) as it reflects the lack of basic grammar of the language.
(b)Writing 'I' with a small 'i' is NOT acceptable.
11.You cannot use short forms like 'don't', coz, &, and can't. Please use full forms like do not, because, and, and cannot.
Referance:-
Pinto,Anil.Class lecture. Christ university.Bangalore,India.17 Feb 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)