Arms and the Man chat class

It was decided to have Arms of the Man discussion on yahoochat at 4 pm today (Sunday). However, some felt that I should have it tomorrow at 4. What do you feel. I am keen on having it today, instead of tomorrow. But if majority of you feels that it should be tomorrow, that should be fine. Please indicate your preferences in the comments section below by 12 noon today. Will clarify by 12.30 pm. My yahoo id is : ajpinto42@yahoo.co.in.

since, many were absent yesterday, can you inform all your classmates, either through sms or emial?


Since there are only three responses, I will have the chat session at 4 today (sunday)

Lacan and 'A Doll's House'

Notes by Kanasu, III yr FEP

The Four Kinds of Discourses of Lacan.

What does one mean when they say that something is a woman’s play? It means that the play should evoke the female symbolic. It needs to create a woman’s world. It should not re-emphasize the male world and therefore, evoke the male symbolic.

1. Discourse of the Master
2. Discourse of the University
3. Discourse of the Analyst
4. Discourse of the Hysteric

Each of these discourses is characterized by an equation. The numerator on the left hand side of the equation holds the most dominant position, and it constantly endeavors to achieve the will of the numerator on the right hand side of the subject.

Each of these discourses is characterized by an equation. The numerator on the left hand side of the equation holds the most dominant position, and it constantly endeavors to achieve the will of the numerator on the right hand side of the subject.

The S₁ stands for the conscious subject.

The S₂ stands for opposite of the conscious subject (the other of the conscious subject) and is always trying to usurp the position of S₁.

$ stands for the unconscious subject.

a stands for the object that wants or needs to be possessed. It is the object of desire. It is something that can never be fathomed but will always be longed for.

1. Discourse of the Master

In the master’s discourse, the conscious subject is the master, and what he says becomes the dominant discourse. The unconscious subject is pushed down, and the master’s discourse is constantly absorbed by S₂. Here, the master’s discourse is accepted without question.

2. Discourse of The University

Here, you accept the other as it is. The concept becomes more important than the unconscious subject. The unconscious subject is pushed to the last position. No suppressed feelings or ideologies are encouraged in this discourse. It is least important. There is a constant endeavor to understand the concept, ‘a’ in this discourse. Moreover, the knowledge becomes more important than the person seeking the knowledge itself.

3. Discourse of the Analyst

In the discourse of the analyst, the unconscious is not confronted face to face. However, the unconscious is not suppressed but asked to open up to the analyst. The conscious subject S₁ is pushed to the last position. Here, there is no ideology that is being mapped onto the unconscious. It is only an attempt to discover the unconscious.

4. Discourse of the Hysteric

Here, the unconscious subject comes to the dominant position. The dominant position becomes important and almost becomes the conscious subject. The structures of S₁ and

S₂ are not recognized. The unconscious does not recognize the structure of S₁ or S₂ which are both part of patriarchy (in the case of Doll’s House). It is least bothered about the other.

The Hysteric, then, becomes the female symbolic.

Is Doll’s House then, a woman’s play?

It can only be a woman’s play if it evokes a female symbolic, if it tries to evoke the hysteric (in this case), and not necessarily about the suffering of women.

Keeping these things in mind, if it is a woman’s play, then how? If it is not a woman’s play, then how?

Reference:

Pinto, Anil. Class Lecture. Is there a Woman's Play. Christ University. Bangalore, India. 07 Mar 2009.

Towards a New Poetics of Practice: Rethinking Feminist Response to the Mangalore Pub Attack

Towards a New Poetics of Practice: Rethinking Feminist Response to the Mangalore Pub Attack - A Discussion with Lata Mani

Venue: Alternative Law Forum, No. 122/4 Infantry Road, Bangalore- 560001
Date: Friday the 13th (yes I know :), March 2009
Time : 6 PM

Lata Maini's note: "In this brief note I raise questions that are posed by the nature and form of feminist response to the attack on women in the Amnesia pub in Mangalore and to the spirited defence of Valentine’s Day that followed Sri Ram Sene’s vigilantism. The creative momentum generated by these events suggest that we may be in a moment in which new activist formations can be forged in response to Right Wing lawlessness. However, the exclusive recourse to a liberal discourse of rights and the refusal to engage questions of culture and ethics have restricted the scope of our interventions and left urgent sociocultural and economic tensions unaddressed. If we are to “seize the time” we would need to engage these difficult questions and be willing to set aside various sacred and secular cows in the process."

Since the intent is to initiate dialogue, Lata Mani will speak for 15 minutes. Du Saraswathy will respond and the floor will then be opened for discussion.

Class 1 on Lacan and A Doll's House

Notes for the class on using Lacan to destabilize the existing idea of Doll’s House as a Feminist Play

• Lacan and Iregary are the two people we are going to touch upon in this respect.
• Background of Lacan: He was kicked out of the psychoanalytic association and he was thrown out of the hospitals he was teaching in because he took client’s time only for 3 min or 2 min instead of the allotted one hour.
• He started lecturing everyday. He had students of the likes of Foucault and Derrida.
• In India, we have only retained Freud and we have never looked at Lacan seriously. Freud came before colonialism.

• Lacan introduced three concepts

1. Real
2. Imaginary
3. Symbolic

• For Lacan, language belonged to the symbolic as against the real out there.

• He said that there was always a tension between the symbolic and the unconscious.
• Notion of the subject is one who suffers, and one who always has to deal with suffering as opposed to the individual, who is more marked by his actions. Individual tends to believe that he functions from a space outside society, and that he can establish or bring about change. This idea emerges post Protestantism and Industrialisation.
• All spaces mark you as something or someone. You are the person, therefore, who is suffering that construct that the space puts upon you.
• You are produced constantly and this gives you coherence.
• The symbol of the tension between the symbolic and the unconscious creates a tension; a tension that challenges the “I think, therefore I am”. There is a gap between the symbolic which is the “I think” and the “I am” which is the unconscious. Therefore, you are not formed before you think.
• All representations do not represent reality but only in a specific urban tradition.
• Slumdog uses the realist tradition to represent the real. It is mot the real.

Iregary: Symbolic is male. All that we produce is the male symbolic. Necessary other to the male and hence outside the male symbolic is the female symbolic. Therefore, the only sex that is there is male. The female is only outside the male self.

Now, then, is Doll’s House then a feminist play in that it seeks to address or speak about the female symbolic? Or does it still speak of the male symbolic itself?

Independence-she walks out- male symbolic

Economic freedom- male symbolic

Where is the female symbolic then?

It is only mimicking the male to draw attention to the male itself in order to destabilize the male symbolic.

[Education and media are the two main ideological apparatus that of the state that perpetuates the male symbolic]

By mimicking, then, they just point to the gap between the male symbolic and the unconscious and are not really creating a female’s play.

Having said all this, is Doll’s House then, a woman’s play?

Reference:

Pinto, Anil. Class Lecture. Is there a Woman's Play. Christ University. Bangalore, India. 06 Mar 2009.

Fourth Summer School on Philosophy for the Social Sciences and Humanities

Centre for Philosophy
National Institute of Advanced Studies
Fourth Summer School on Philosophy for the Social Sciences and Humanities
(Sponsored by ICSSR Western Regional Centre, Mumbai)

A three-week summer school for MA, MPhil and PhD students from all over the country will be held at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore.
Dates: Monday, June 8, 2009 – Friday, June 26, 2009

Who Can Apply
MA, MPhil and early PhD students working in the broad areas of social sciences and humanities (including philosophy).

How to Apply
Send a CV (with marks, email, phone and contact address details) along with an essay/working paper that you have written. The last date for receiving the complete application is March 15, 2009.

Accommodation and Travel
Selected students will be reimbursed for their outstation travel by non–AC, sleeper class train or bus fare (to and fro) and will also be provided accommodation free of cost at NIAS during the course period.

Contact: Send your application as an email attachment to Centre for Philosophy, NIAS, email: cfpnias@gmail.com or mail a hard copy to the address below.
Centre For Philosophy
National Institute of Advanced Studies
Indian Institute of Science Campus
Bangalore - 560012
Telephone: +91-80-22185000
(For more information, see http://www.nias.res.in/researchgroups-cfp-programmes.php)

I FEP SUMMER INTERNSHIP – APRIL, MAY 2009 Guidelines

Guidelines for the group assigned to me (08D4401 – 4418):

• Prepare a proposal in about 100 words and email it to me. The proposal should include name and address of the newspaper where you would be doing your internship, a brief write up on that newspaper, reasons for your choice of that particular newspaper, your plans during the internship and your opinion on how the internship will help you develop as an effective media person. The proposal should reach me on or before 15 March 2009.

• You are to collect a diary from Mr Kennedy by showing the receipt for Rs 30 paid at the admission office. Make entries into the diary on day-to-day basis. Your diary entries should include the assignments you were given, details of how you went about doing the assignments, new things you learnt about the field, about yourself and your abilities that day. After a few days, the diary entries will look similar, clichéd and monotonous. It is up to you to find newness and creativity in your internship everyday.

• During your internship in the newspapers, try to get as many by-lines as possible. They will carry a lot of weight on your CV later. However, you will soon realise that it is not easy to get them. Most of the time the news briefs or news stories that you write will be published under the title ‘From our staff correspondent’ or ‘_____ News Network.’ Do not lose heart.

• Try to build as many contacts as possible both within the organisation and with people you meet in the field. You will realise the value of it during the internship and later as you try to climb the professional and social ladder.

• Try and do challenging news stories or features. See if you can come up with your own topics for features or news stories. Remember journalism is literature in a hurry and has a very short life span. Therefore, timeliness of an article or news is the most crucial value that will prove your talent and ability. Your genius is not what will make you valuable but your consistency.

• Compile the copies of your published works regularly, be they briefs, news stories or features in a file. You will have to submit them along with your on-the-job reports when the college reopens.

• If you want some guidance, want to share your success or failure feel free to email me anytime

All the best

MA in English with Communication Studies

Christ University offers MA in English with Communication Studies in four semesters. The programme is first of its kind in India in that it broadens the English studies programme to include the newer fields that have emerged within the English studies domain in the last few years. It is also the first Maters programme in English to introduce compusory internship.

Facilities: The programme gives access to a very good library which is updated almost every week. There is also access to online journal databases such as JSTOR, EBSCOR, ICFAI Journals. The campus is fully wi-fi enabled.

The University has an MOU with CSCS (Centre for the Study of Cutlure and Society, Bangalore) . CSCS offers regular certificate programmes in Cultural Studies, Media, and Gender Studies.

Following are

Semester I
British Literature: Genres & Ideas
Reading Twentieth Century European Art, Culture & Society
Literary Criticism
American Literary Thoughts & Ideas
Professional Communication

Semester II
Gender Studies
Contemporary Theory
Linguistics
English Language Teaching
Mass Communication

Internship (Educational institution, Research centre, Media House)

Semester III
Indian Literatures In Translation
World Literatures
Research & Writing Heuristics
Postcolonial Studies
Theatre Studies

Semester IV
Dissertation
Contemporary Indian Novel (In English)
Cultural Studies
Film Studies
Popular Culture
Translation Studies (Elective)
Script writing for Radio, Television & Film (Elective)

The Department also offers MPhil and PhD programme.

For further details you mail email to admission@christuniversity.in or post your questions in the comments section below.

Rethinking English Studies.

When one of my colleagues asked me to give a list of possible courses that could go into the proposed BA English Studies (honours) programme at our University, following the list that I emailed to her. I am posting it here so that those who are looking for rethinking their English Studies curriculum can benefit from it.

1. Gender and English studies
2. Gender and Culture
3. English language and linguistics (Strongly recommend it.) - A common course in most Continental and Asian university honours curriculum.
4. Latin American Literature
5. South Asian literature (very potential. The field is already emerging with conferences being organized and books being published. Strongly recommend.
6. African literature.
7. South Indian literature/Dravidian literature (We will be the first to offer this paper? Wanna make history?. I am all for it. Strongly recommended.)
8. Reading, Reading Practices and Critical Theory.
9. Children's literature. (not so popular in India as yet, but a rage on either sides of the Atlantic.)
10. Literature and other disciplines (philosophy, theology, history, sociology, anthropology, music, paining, journalism- to look at their engagement with literature both in disciplinary theory and practice)
11. Popular literature
12. Colonial literature in India (literature produced in India during the colonial periods by the orientalists, Colonizers, nationalists and others - as this laid the foundation for literary production in India as also set numerous problematic discourses rolling. An area that has remained only as domain of history and culture studies research. Needs to be brought to the academia.
13. Convert American literature to North American literature more as a postcolonial/postglobalisation strategy.
14. Please avoid Canadian and Australian. I seriously do not see any merit compared to the papers we already have and those that I have suggested. They largely managed to push themselves though funding - a political agenda. And we failed to so seriously look at African literature or Latin American literature as an area to be engaged with - they were cash starved and going there was below dignity and there were no 'good' scholarships.
15. Folk Studies
16. World literatures in translations
17. Canonical Classics in Translation
18. Queer literature

Let not our fears and our inability to give up uncontested traditions stop us.

CALL FOR DOCTORAL GRANT PROPOSALS 2009

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

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

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.

National Seminar on Representation of the Subalterns

Sri Venkataramana Swamy College, Bantwal, Karnataka

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 India.

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): March 10, 2009.

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 March 25, 2009. Rs.100 is the delegate fee.

For more Details Contact: Co-ordinator

Dr.T.K.Ravindran, Head, Dept. of English, S.V.S. College, Bantwal (D.K.), Karnataka. (0)9481213388, 08255 -234123(R), 08255-233374(O)

Procedure of Filing an FIR - For women in case of an attack

Dear Readers/Visitors of this Blog,

Considering the recent attacks on young women in Bangalore, I am posting the following information. Do read it and then forward it to those whom you know would find it useful as awareness or as useful. I thank Neeti Mahesh for the information

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

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

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:

1. 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 Man. Such a concept of Art as a pure expression of joy was present in the early days of human civilization when artists created harmonies through different artistic mediums like painting, music and literature just as God created the harmony of the universe.

2. 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 Man.

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’.