III Semester MA English Research and Writing Heuristics CIA 2

Attempt a semiotic study of Girish Karnad’s play assigned to you. You may finalise your own topic/title around the play assigned. If you wish you may do a semiotic study of the translation of the play to the language you are most familiar with. In which case please inform me in advance and during the submission of your research paper, attach a copy of the translation.

You will be evaluated based on understanding of semiotics, research competence displayed, and overall performance. Should you wish to incorporate any other criteria do let me know. Please ensure that you are making an argument in your research paper.

You will have to submit the paper in hard copy, printed back to back, and email a soft copy to me. Format: A4 paper, 14 font size, 1 ½ line spaced, font- Times New Roman. While the hard copies will be bound and made available in the library for general reference, the soft copies will be uploaded to this blog and scribd.

Date of submission will be decided mutually during my lecture hour tomorrow.

Plays Assigned

· Tuglaq (Jijo, Priyadarshini)

· Hayavadana (Joe, Payal, Swathi)

· Bali: The Sacrifice (Aditi, Tomy)

· Naga-Mandala (Anjali, Sarjoo, Sunita)

· Tale-Danda (Anju, Saima)

· The Fire and the Rain (Fancy, Shreyasi)

· The Dreams of Tipu Sultan (Gorgia, Yashaswini)

· Flowers (Harita, Thammanoon, Samji)

· Broken Image (Jolsna, Sayori)

· Wedding Album (Levin, Priya)

· Yayathi (Namitha)

· Semiotic study of the self-translation of Naga-Mandala (Rashmi)

All the plays are available in Collected Plays: Volume One and Collected Plays: Volume Two by Girish Karnad, except for Wedding Album which is printed separately. The copies can be found in the library.

All the best

Links to digital articles databases

Click on the links below to visit the cites

http://www.highbeam.com/

http://www.eric.ed.gov/

http://vos.ucsb.edu/

A Death of an innocent misconception

Class Note, 15th July, 09 (I M.A English)

A discussion on Plato’s REPUBLIC had barely ensued, when with the customary tendency to float away that comes with being a man of many thoughts, Mr. Pinto typically steered us from poor Plato and into the field of Psychology. Opinions were exchanged about that discipline, judgments were made (some fair some not) and then a question was raised trying to connect Psychology, the study of the mind, to Literature.

“Don’t we, as Literature students, also study various texts with the hope of understanding the mind of the author behind the text?”

In response, there was a laugh from the man of Literature himself. Not unkind laughter but more like an “I’m sorry, but I’m going to now slowly and systematically disabuse you of all your sweet notions” sort of laugh.

Exit: Plato’s ‘Republic’
Enter: ‘Death of the Author” – Roland Barthes.

Barthes made famous the notion of doing away with the Author, the idea of the text as a site of free play or pleasure, and differences such as those between ‘work’ and ‘text’, and ‘writerly’ and ‘readerly’ works of art. The idea that it is not the Author who is primary but the reader.

He talks of the problem of the subject, insisting on viewing an author or persona as a grammatical rather than a psychological subject. The well known formulation of this problem occurs in ‘Death of the Author’ (1968), a phrase which has come to be associated with both Barthes and structuralism just as the phrase ‘God is dead’ had been attributed (accurately/ inaccurately) to Nietzsche (it had first occurred in Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology’???).

Barthes begins the essay by quoting a sentence from Balzac’s novella ‘Sarra Sine’: ‘This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility.’

He throws open the question, who is the speaker of the words? Is it the hero of the story, or Balzac himself drawing on his experience of women? Or is he professing literary notions of feminity? Or is it universal wisdom?

His answer is that we can never know because “writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.”

Even in the present, says Barthes, our studies of Literature and Literary history are “tyrannically centered on the author.” The newer modes of criticism (by which he presumably means phenomenological and psychoanalytical criticism), he claims, have often consolidated this obsession. Recently many writers have challenged this centrality of the author. Mallarme recognized that it is “language which speaks, not the author.”

At this point, a small experiment was conducted in class. We were asked to take a blank sheet of paper and follow Mr. Pinto’s instructions carefully and write a poem (or just about any thought that came into the head). We were asked not to think and just go with the flow of our thoughts. When he instructed us to write the first line, we were to write it and move on to writing the second line only when he said so. Like this we jotted down our thoughts in twenty lines and discovered that even though our initial lines seemed a little constructed and structured (it was inevitable that some of us would cheat and not follow the instruction of ‘don’t think too much’), as we were writing the last 12 lines or so, it was indeed our language which was guiding us into writing and not our preconceived thoughts, ideas or plans of writing according to a theme/ purpose/ objective.

Proof of this is in the impromptu writing of Rungkan, ‘Apple’, of my class. This is what she composed during our experiment and it is dedicated by her to Mr. Pinto:

There is a man who comes
Nothing in hands, but books
And knowledge in brain
He is neither mad nor bad
He asked me to write
Something that he named it ‘poem’
I took my pen jolt down something strange and meaningless
Nothing I understood what he said
He is not mad but I’m running mad
Because I know nothing about writing
That he said and claimed as ‘poem’
Stanza, octave, and rhythm all these I have learnt
But I don’t know where to start
And how to end
So I start making fun of myself
Writing this poem…
First time in my life ‘English Poem’
Is it a poem? I still know nothing
Whether it is poem or not
Then he stops before my poem starts…

( :) Surely, this deserves an applause?)

The removal of the author transforms the modern text. Previously, the author was conceived as the past of his own book, the preexisting cause and explanation. In contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text…there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written HERE and NOW.

Hence we can no longer think of writing in the classical ways, as recording, representing, or depicting. Rather, writing is a “performative” act in which “the enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered – something like the I DECLARE of Kings or the I SING of very ancient poets.”

In writing, the modern scriptor traces a field with no origin, or at least one which has “no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins.” What’s more, a text can no longer be viewed as releasing in a linear fashion a single ‘theological’ meaning, as the message of the “Author-God”. Rather, it is a multi dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The writer has only the power to mix writings.

The demise of the author spells the demise of criticism: deciphering a text becomes a futile endeavor: “To give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.”

Barthes concludes by pointing out that the multiplicity of writing – its drawing from various cultures and styles – is focused and unified in one place: the Reader (not the Author). A text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.

Yet, Barthes cautions that the humanism we have rejected via removal of the author should not be reintroduced through any conception of the reader as a personal and complete entity. The reader of which Barthes speaks is a reader “without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that SOMEONE who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.” In other words, the reader, like the author, is a function of the text. In this sense, the birth of the Reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

WikiWars - conference based international event on the Wikipedia, February 2010

Call for Participation; 12^th, 13^th January, 2010, Bangalore

Event One for the Critical Point of View Reader

CPOV (Critical Point of View) Context: The Wikipedia has emerged as the de facto global reference of dynamic knowledge. Different stakeholders – Wikipedians, users, academics, researchers, gurus of Web 2.0, publishing houses and governments have entered into fierce debates and discussions about what the rise of Wikipedia and Wiki cultures means and how they influence the information societies we live in. The Wikipedia itself has been at the centre of much controversy, pivoted around questions of accuracy, anonymity, vandalism, expertise and authority.

The Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore, India) and the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam, Netherlands) are working together to produce a critical Reader on Wikipedia and to build a Wikipedia Knowledge Network. Under the rubric CPOV, we propose two events that bring together different perspectives, approaches, experiences and stories that critically explore different questions and concerns around Wikipedia. The proceeds from these two events will result in a Reader that consolidates critical points of view about Wikipedia.

WikiWars Conference: The first conference to be held in Bangalore, called WikiWars, invites participation from users, scholars, academics, practitioners, artists and other cultural workers, to share their experiences, ideas, experiments, innovations, applications and stories about Wikipedia. The WikiWars conference embodies the spirit that guides an open encyclopaedia like the Wikipedia, by referring to the edit battles that users enter into over topics that have many points of view. WikiWars also refers to the contradictory positions adopted by different stakeholders on the various issues of credibility, authority, verifiability and truth-telling, on the Wikipedia. This conference calls for diverse and varied knowledges to come together in a critical dialogic space that informs and augments our understanding of the Wikipedia.

Conference Themes: The possible themes and areas for presentations (projects, experiences, experiments, stories or documentation) can include but are not limited to:

• Wiki Theory: Endorse, question/contest or delineate the theoretical approaches and view points on the Wikipedia
• Wikipedia and Critique of Western Knowledge Production: The predominance of textual or linguistic cultures, post-western knowledge production systems, and indigenous knowledge systems
• Wiki Art: Art that uses Wikipedia models, structures or data to explore and expand the practice of Wikipedia project; and accounts that document Wikipedia based art practices or debates
• Designing Debate: Suggestions, innovations, critiques and ideas that focus on the design and form of the Wikipedia, to explore the claims of neutrality, objectivity, emergent hierarchy, control and authenticity on the Wikipedia
• Critique of Free and Open: Areas like Wikipedia governance, economic practices of and around Wikipedia, and the nature of freedom in usage, production and participation on the Wikipedia
• Global Politics of Exclusion: Exploring questions of non-western material inclusion, language, connectedness, oral histories, women, non-geeks, and alternative material that cannot be documented on Wikipedia etc.
• The Place of Resistance: Space of resistance and dissent in the Wikipedia, structures that allow for alternative voices, experiences and ideas
• Wikipedia and Education: Wikipedia usage in classrooms as a teaching resource, and its effect on pedagogy, the role of Wikipedia in the knowledge production sector, and mobilisation of academic communities around the Wikipedia

For detailed information on each theme, please go to http://cis-india.org/publications/workshops/conference-blogs/Wikiwars

Who Should Apply: The conference in Bangalore aims to bring together an interesting mix of diverse voices from different cultures, geo-political spaces, and context-based practices from around the world, to start consolidating the approaches, experiences, and impact of the Wikipedia:

1. Students and Wikipedia users who belong to different local chapters or have editorial/contribution experiences on the Wikipedia,
2. Academics and publishers who are exploring the changes caused by Wikipedia, both in classroom pedagogy and in knowledge production systems,
3. Researchers and theoreticians, practitioners and proponents, artists and social activists, who are interested in Wikipedia cultures and their socio-political conditions, should be attending this conference.

How To Apply: To apply for the conference, please send the following information by email to infowiki@cis-india.org by the 31^st of August, 2009. 1. A note of interest (450 - 700 words) detailing your ideas and possible contribution 2. Your updated resume 3. A sample of your work (term papers, published articles, peer-reviewed papers, books, art-projects, social intervention projects etc.)

Conference time-line:

Last Date for submitting Note of Interest and Funding options – 31^st August, 2009

Announcement of short-listed proposals – 21^st September, 2009.

Sharing of Detailed Proposals with all participants – 15^th December, 2009

Announcement of Conference Schedule and Logistics – 30^th December 2009

Online Registration for non-presenting participants – 3^rd January 2010

Conference Dates – 12^th, 13^th January 2010

Travel support: Travel support is available for some of the conference participants (national and international). The selected participants will be provided with the basic travel and accommodation costs for the duration of the conference from their home-countries/cities to travel to Bangalore for the conference. If you are applying for travel support, please indicate clearly in your “Note of Interest” any of these three options: 1. Full travel support required. 2. Partial travel support required with estimate. 3. Travel support not required. Travel support will be provided by the conference organisers on a case-by-case basis.

Conference Organisers: Sunil Abraham (Sunil@cis-india.org) and Nishant Shah (Nishant@cis-india.org ), Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. If there are any queries regarding the WikiWars conference please write to us.

Research and Editorial Team: Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (Amsterdam), Nathaniel Tkacz (Melbourne), Johanna Niesyto (Siegen), Sunil Abraham and Nishant Shah (Bangalore).

Summer Course: Film and the Historical Imagination

Course instructor: Ranjani Mazumdar, Associate Professor, Cinema Studies,
School of Arts & Aesthetics, JNU

July 27 – August 7, 2009

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS

The JB MRC invites applications from graduate students, media researchers and practitioners for a two-week long theory course titled “Film and the Historical Imagination”

Course Description:
Film is an archive of sensations, of emotions, of images and of sounds. As a powerful recorder of life and its events, Film lends itself to organizing not just historical knowledge but also commenting on the nature of historical narration. This two week introductory course on Film and the Historical Imagination will map the specific ways in which history and ideas about the past get constructed through the medium of cinema. Issues related to questions of evidence, memory, historical catastrophe, nostalgia, myth and heritage will be discussed and analyzed in relation to world cinema. The course is structured in the form of five illustrated lectures, followed by five full length screenings. The course will conclude with a round table discussion with all participants. A set of key essays will be provided in the form of a reader. The sessions would be held from 11 am to 5 pm every alternate day of the week, excluding weekends.

Ranjani Mazumdar is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her publications and films focus on urban cultures, popular cinema, gender and the cinematic city. She is the author of Bombay Cinema: Archive of the City which was co published by the University of Minnesota Press and Permanent Black, 2007. She is currently co-authoring a book on the Contemporary Film Industry. Her current research interests include the cinema of the 1960s, Globalization and Film Culture, and Film and History.

To apply: Send your CV and a brief statement (500 words max) outlining your interest in attending the course to courses.jbmrc@gmail.com<mailto:courses.jbmrc@gmail.com> or to the Course Coordinator, JB MRC, AJK MCRC, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi 110025.
• Last date for applications: July 23, 2009
• Course commencement date: July 27, 2009

Selected applicants will be charged Rs. 650/- as the course fee

Historical Biographical and Moral Philosophical approach

( The Following is lectures notes by Mr. Pinto - P.S.ENG-III)

In the words of Mr. Pinto, literature does not teach us anything. If, for instance, an individual take up psychology she can become a psychologist or if one is engaged in the field of sociology he can become a sociologist, literature is the only subject wherein an individual cannot be an expert. For example, literature will not teach us how to write a poem. All literature does is engage us in a textual analysis. Our unconscious is accustomed towards textual analysis and hence our engagement in the classroom with the various texts is nothing but a textual analysis of the text. This was Mr. Pinto’s reply to all those who didn’t have a text in the class.

Mr. Pinto wanted us to cultivate an interest in
1. Logic

2. Few schools of philosophy- Socratic school of philosophy

3. The works of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Khant, Engel and Foucault.

In today’s’ class Mr. Pinto commented on the historical biographical approach and Moral philosophical approach. He took up the word “text” and analyzed it for us. He said textile and textual drew similar ideas. Just as textile is a mixture of various elements, text/ual is also quite similar. A text, like textile, is woven together giving us a definite pattern of writing. Mr. Pinto highlighted the limitations of language by saying that one cannot go beyond the structure of the text. He said that there can be constant replays, modification and difference in perception of the text but all this can take place only within the boundaries of the structure of the text. He said that with a close engagement with the text we can see through it. We cannot accuse the writer based on one notion of the text it is important to take into account the authenticity of the text. The versions that come to us might not always be the original publication but rather the edited versions or editions. For e.g. In Andrew Marvell’s “To his Coy Mistress” instead of “dew” the first edition of the poem had “glue”. Shakespeare’s works’ that we have read is also not the original version but rather edited versions of his work.
The term Genre is a French word that divides the text into various segments. A text may have various genres ranging from poems, essays, short stories and novels. In similar ways poem is also divided into various genres. A poem can be ballad, sonnets, villanelle, the elegy, the ode, the sestina, the haiku and the dramatic monologue. The Elegy harbours the pattern of lamentation; the Ode uses the Pindaric pattern and haiku is a celebration of wisdom which delays understanding.
Haiku combines form, content and language in a meaningful yet compact form. Mr Pinto quoted

“O wonder marvel,
I cut woods,
I drew water from the well.”
These lines have been written by a Buddhist monk after getting enlightened. Though he witnessed change within him, life does not after enlightenment. The monk’s perception towards life may be different after enlightenment but he still had to cut wood and draw water from the well.

Historical biographies concern itself with the emphasis on super structure and the biography of the poet. It was in the seventeenth century that Andrew Marvell wrote “To his Hoy Mistress”. The social setup in that particular time was highly puritan. Renaissance had influenced classical learning and hence Logic. Logic is the formal and systematic study of principle of valid inference and correct reasoning. The term logic is very precise and very particular with the use of languages. For example the opposite of white is non-white and not black or green. The Physical world is structured in such a way there is only an existence of zero and one. To his Coy Mistress is an argument towards a school of thought of puritans and the structure. The argument was a reflection of the writing process removed from traditional conceptions of time and a discourse on the urgency of creating written material within human time frames with the presentation of written material as a celebration of life. This pattern of writing did not reflect the poet’s personal emotions but rather a comment on the structure of the society. Thus the weaving of the text was only a pattern to say something.

Taking a moral philosophical approach towards reading “To his Coy Mistress” Mr. Pinto said that the poem is not of sexual imagery but of time. Mr. Pinto also says that to have clarity in idea one must read philosophy. Andrew Marvell systematically reasoned with his desired object about the futility of delaying their interlude when the hours available to them were limited. Metaphysical writers viewed poetry as an intellectual exercise, an opportunity to develop ideas in a logical, argumentative structure; for them, the object of poetry was not to serve as an outlet for an effusion of emotional sentiments. If one approaches "To a Coy Mistress" as a discussion of the pressures which time placed upon a writer, Marvel's apostrophe took on an ironic twist. He used his analytical skills to coax his writing to manifest his intended desires, providing a playful look at the connection between a man and his work. Complicating this relationship was the necessity of negotiating under the terms and constraints of an outside third party: time.

A Peek at Plato

Mr. Pinto’s Class Note – 10^th July, 09.

(Scene: It’s 5 minutes to the end of Mr. Pinto’s class and he hasn’t yet arrived; busy with an extended interview-meeting. Just when we were all trudging along outside to enjoy a lazy day at the campus, he’s in our class in a flash. There’s an explosion of energy and in just about 10 minutes, he gives us a mine of information. By all rights we should have been groaning and saying nasty things about him, for first making us wait, and then making us stay those extra 10 minutes. But the palpable energy being exchanged in those ten minutes was, to everyone’s good fortune, mutually relished. Besides, it was obvious we had rescued him from what appeared at that time to be brain atrophy. So who cares about those extra 10 minutes when we were briefly heroes?!?)

‘Adeimantus, you and I are not making up stories at the moment; we are founding a community.’

[379, Republic, Book II]

Whether he had known at that time his impact on the future generations of thinkers or not, there is no disputing that the Greek Philosopher Plato laid the foundations of Western Philosophy. He gave initial formulation to the most basic questions and problems (which will be discussed in the next few postings) of Western thought. Literary critics throughout the ages have returned again and again to the classical themes set down by Plato and it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that history of criticism cannot properly be understood without some of Plato’s key ancient texts, especially since they have exerted such a seminal influence on the discourse of criticism in the ages to come.

A lot of speculation is drawn about the personal details of Plato, only natural considering his popularity. Even his name is being speculated about. Plato or Aristocles, after his grandfather? We know that his birth was roughly around 427/428 B.C and his death, 347/348 B.C. He came from an old Athenian family, said to have played a prominent part in Athenian politics. So it’s interesting that he chose philosophy over politics as his way of curing the ills of society.

An old story says Dionysius sold Plato as a slave and his friends and uncles bought him and set him free. He then became a student of Socrates and later founded the ACADEMY. The Academy was the first school of philosophy and is acknowledged as the first university of the world. At the entrance of the Academy was written:

‘Those who don’t know geometry do not enter this portal.’

This doesn’t just refer to the significant role of mathematics in philosophy and a philosopher’s life but also the importance of abstract thinking required of a philosopher. The little that is known about the Academy is that it was a public gymnasium and that Plato didn’t charge fees for his lessons. It is unlikely that Plato’s school had many of the institutional features of a modern university, so all those who’d like to visualize Plato in his Academy as a sort of Father Vice Chancellor at Christ University, kindly cease thinking along that line of thought.

One known public lecture of Plato’s on ‘The Good’ was said to be a fiasco because the audience came to hear about probably the good life and Plato talked about mathematics.

Plato was the first thinker to demarcate philosophy as a subject, as a distinct way of thinking about, and relating to, a wide range of issues and problems. Philosophy in this sense is still taught and learned in schools and universities today. To put it succinctly, we’re still tackling the questions and problems laid down by Plato in this very 21^st Century and that sums up the significance of Plato’s theories in our lives.

[References: Mr. Pinto; A History of Literary Criticism and Theory – M. A. R Habib; PLATO – A Very Short Introduction, Julia Annas]

Emergence of English as a Subject of Study

(Mr. Pinto’s Class Note – 8th July ‘09)
(Notes contributed by Panom and Divya)

The 3 reasons for English becoming a subject of study were: to consolidate declining feudal power; Imperialism; Military/ totalitarian purposes.

Before examining the above mentioned areas, let’s address the interesting question of When Did Literature Emerge?

Invention of the printing press (1453) by John (Johannes) Gutenberg coincided with the gradual removal of the monopoly that the clergy held over literacy. This shift in monopoly was made possible largely due to urbanization and industrialization. We saw that the onus on the primary sector (agriculture) was slowly diminishing and secondary sector (Industries) took off. What has to be noted is that this industrialization became possible due to colonization.

With the advent of industrialization, there was a need for more clerks and book keepers etc. who naturally needed to be taught and educated in order to increase their efficiency. Earlier, the tradition of education was mainly a seminary one (Wordsworth, Shelly, Keats etc.) and was limited to the age old institutions of Oxford and Cambridge. With the concept of division of labor and regulated work hours, it allowed for a certain novelty called ‘free time’ which was not seen before. Until then there weren’t any regulated work hours like the 8 hour concept we see in the 20th century. In fact, there was a large percentage of children being employed as workers as well and exploited for their ability to work long hours. (References were made by Mr. Pinto to William Blake’s THE CHIMNEY SWEEPER) In this new found free time people naturally turned to reading. Free grammar schools with scholarships began to appear; a lot many workers pooled their resources and hired teachers to teach their children in evening schools. They started reading and studying Romances (full of wars, heroes, knights etc.)

There became an increasing need to ‘know’ more and learn more, even if they happened to be practical pieces of information such as instances of the happenings around them. They started ‘telling stories’ to know more which gave birth to two things – Journalism; Literature.

The ‘Novel’ took off as it was a way of telling “something new”, like a new story that converted incidents into a narrative. The colonials contributed to this ‘novel’ or storytelling. (Mr. Pinto made references to the chapter ‘Defoe’s England’ in G. M. Trevelyan’s ENGLISH SOCIAL HISTORY) Defoe himself had perfected the art of the reporter; even his novels such as Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders are imaginary ‘reports’ of daily life. For Defoe was one of the first who saw the old world through a pair of sharp modern eyes.

(Note: By the 19th Century, all experiments regarding the novel had already been exhausted – with perhaps the exception of the Stream Of Consciousness which came about in the 20th Century.) (FYI: Observers would notice that the 19th Century wrote and read far more number of novels than the 20th Century ever saw.)

So many forces played a role in what we today call “reading habits or reading culture”. All this and also the theories of evolution (those existing even before Darwin’s conception) created a huge change in social structure which saw the rise and seemingly inevitable decline in feudal power.

Consolidation of this power in the 19th Century was done in the form of literature. It was used as a political tool and also a source. Literature in a sense addresses all structures of society; the working class, the middle class and the elite. This therefore explains its success as a tool. From Eagleton’s essay The Rise of English, we see how Literature was first introduced as a subject of study to mechanical engineers to bring about ‘morality’. Later, it was studied extensively by women at Oxford, perhaps because they were discouraged from studying the sciences. It was a social construct of expectation and opportunity allotting.

Imperialism being the second reason for English becoming a subject of study saw its works being implemented wherever the English went when they had to consolidate their power. “Flag follows the trade” – the classic imperialistic principle. Literature was introduced to the middle classes and texts were carefully selected and doled out, ensuring that the English stamped their power and superiority over the colonies. On retrospect, it seems like such an obvious design. We saw it happen in Africa by the English, French and Germans. We also saw it in Latin countries as well as India by the British.

Military purposes and totalitarian control were the third reason for English becoming a subject of study. Cleary a strategic move and language typically was introduced to consolidate power and subdue confusion. We saw it happen with India as well where Hindi was introduced after independence in an attempt to unify the nation. Similarly, Britain introduced English Literature to do the same.

'The Rise of English

'Construction of English'

Notes composed by: Nidhi V Krishna

1st MA Lecture, 8th June, 2009

Up until the 14th Century, the Feudal class possessed utmost power as the population engaged solely in primary sector economic activities such as agriculture, mining and animal husbandry. However, the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the 1450s brought about the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial revolution influenced the emergence of English.

The Industrial Revolution, transformed the cities into urban centers, raised the standard of living and exhilarated the emergence of urban spaces. The secondary sector, now, occupied a dominant position. The operation of the manufacturing units required extensive labor. The advent of the manufacturing industry led to the creation of several job opportunities. Besides foremen, clerks, book keepers, store keepers etc., were employed.

Eventually, Industrial capitalization created a clear demarcation between the feudal class and the working class. It made the lives of the working class strenuous and mechanical. The oppressed working class chose to break away from the shackles of the feudal class. Colonization fuelled the rebellion and gave momentum to the Romantics. The Romantics assumed the role of political activists. The writers used Journalism and Literature as the ‘medium of telling’. Journalism sought to reproduce stories in a refreshingly new manner whereas Literature used the ‘novel’ as device to transform society.

Due to this defiance, the Feudal class started losing ultimate power, and hence took recourse in literature. They used Literature as a tool to consolidate their power. Literature was introduced in the Mechanics Institutes to instill moral values into the intellectually deprived working class. In universities, women were excluded from disciplines such as science and other professions. Therefore they had to resort to English.

During this era, imperialism took centre stage. The value system was pushed among the intellectuals. The imperialists used Literature, predominantly tragedies, to consolidate the working class, so that the separate parts of the British Empire that were falling apart could be secured as a single state.

English Literature was then, threatened by German Literature when everyone in England began relishing the contents of the latter. In an effort to contain English Language and English Literature, the totalitarian strategy was adopted. The military took upon itself, the responsibility of preserving and promoting English by reviving national pride among the masses.

The essays and people discussed in class

Rene Descartes
Thomas Hobbes
Immanuel Kant
Roland Barthes- Death of the Author
Derrida
Michel Foucault- What is an Author?
T.S Eliot- Traditions and Individual Talent

Certificate Programme in the Technology and Culture (Digital Classroom)

Certificate Programme in the Technology and Culture (Digital Classroom)

1. Introduction:
Certificate Programme in the Digital Class will be conducted by Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore with the direct participation of Centre for Internet Studies (CIS), Bangalore and Centre for Education Beyond Curriculum (CEDBEC), Christ University, Bangalore and organised by Department of Media Studies, Christ University, Bangalore.

2. Programme Objective:
The purpose of this course is to investigate the transformations taking place in the classroom through the process of digitization of the various aspects of classroom pedagogy. Both courses and class readings are downloadable on various formats, teachers commonly use blog and wiki formats as pedagogic devices, students ‘publish’ their assignments and engage in various kinds of peer-learning practices. While several universities and undergraduate colleges have actively adopted such technologies, it is unclear as to how drastic the change is. Is the change no more than conventional content and teaching/assessment strategies moving to new platforms? Or is the change more fundamental than that?

5. Programme Structure:

This course, to be conducted with media students of the Christ University will also see the active participation of faculty from a range of disciplines across the board: education, law, computer science and sociology. It will be conducted over 10 sessions to be divided into five modules which are tentatively listed below:

Module 1: The University and the Class
This module, pivoted around Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins (Harvard, 1996), explores the historic transformation of the classroom as the location for the pursuit of ‘excellence’. From its classic Humboldtian origins, to its ‘developmental’ stage – the rise of the mass-classroom, the principle of education for all – to a present space in which it is a gigantic agglomeration of a variety of small experimental spaces – the classroom has changed dramatically. This module will explore the theory of the classroom, and the change taking place in the category of the student, the teacher and the ‘imparting’ of knowledge paradigm. Students will explore key websites which have explored how such paradigms have changed, and report on their findings.

Module 2: The Public Nature of the Classroom
Both students and teachers are recognizing that the classroom is a very public space: students ‘publish’ their papers, teachers upload their class lectures and put up blogs that are technically accessible to the public at large. What does the entry of the world outside do to the classroom as a closed space for intellectual work, frank debate and the display of insecurity? This module will work with John Willinsky’s The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship (MIT Press, 2006), sections on ‘Development’, ‘Public’, ‘Politics’ and ‘Rights’.

Module 3: The Digital Native
The concept of the ‘digital native’ originates with Marc Prensky’s Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (2001) to look at a ‘new breed of student entering educational establishments’. The term draws an analogy between how a country's natives, for whom the local religion, language, and folkways are natural and indigenous, separate them from immigrants to a country who often are expected to adapt and assimilate to their newly adopted home. Prensky refers to accents employed by digital immigrants, such as printing documents rather than commenting on screen or printing out emails to save in hard copy form. Digital immigrants are said to have a "thick accent" when operating in the digital world in distinctly pre-digital ways, when, for instance, he might "dial" someone on the telephone to ask if his email was received. How ‘native’ is the digital student today? What happens to the ‘immigrant’, i.e. someone seriously technologically challenged by the heavy reliance on digital ‘insiderism’?

This module will split into an inquiry into the problems faced by the both the class teacher and the student, both of whom may or may not be digital natives. It will include one survey to be conducted about volunteer faculty and volunteer students in Christ University, on the problems and possibilities of digital insiderism. Students will assemble and publish survey results online.

Module 4: Technologies Of L;Earning (1): The Institution And The Institutional Repository
This section will be a set of practical sessions on the role and purpose of repositories in academic institutions. Students will actively explore such classic repositories as CSeARCH (http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/CSeARCH.HTM) to see the benefits and problems of repositories. It will end with hands-on experience of a repository, located either at CSCS or at Christ University itself.

Module 5: Technologies of Learning (2):
This session will include two key components:
• Role of peer learning, or student-teach-student.
• Role of examination processes: Are examinations changing? Should they change?
This will again be a hands-on experiment, working mainly with hand-held devices, and the role such devices play in the facilitating peer/participatory learning, and in the continuous assessment mechanisms that are replacing end-of-term examinations. We may actually experiment with a new device here, supported by the Nokia Research Centre, Bangalore (to be confirmed).

Duration: Three months. Classes conducted on Saturdays 2-4 pm. Classes begin on 11 July

Contact: Anil Pinto, Dept of Media Studies - ajpinto42 at gmail dot com
Programe Fee: Rs 1000
Venue: Room 913, II Floor, Auditorium Block

Intentional Fallacy

( The Following is lectures notes by Mr. Pinto - P.S.ENG-III)

Intentional Fallacy was the topic of discussion in Mr. Pinto’s class today. Intentional Fallacy addresses the assumption that the meaning intended by the author, of a literary work, is of primary importance. He said that fallacy was a fault in the argument or something that is not logical. Intentional Fallacy depicts that the writer has the final interpretation. The entire authority of interpretation lies with the author. He supported this with a Marxist example, where he said that the structure had the authority of defining social meaning.

New criticism emerged in the United States of America after the Second World War. Post World War-II lots of “men” sent to fight the war for the government were brought back to the country. In order to engage the soldiers, they were sent to colleges. The classrooms suddenly became huge and it was becoming problematic for the English lecturers especially in keeping the class engaged. To overcome this, the lecturers started handing out photocopies of a poem to the class and told them to interpret it in their own way. Thus it ultimately gave rise to new criticism.
Mr. Pinto then presented us with the argument of Marshal Melchan. With the rise in global media Melchan held the view that technology was determined with how one interacts with it. He supported his argument by saying that the modern day journey is towards loneliness and books primarily does it. He said that when we write poems or journals, we do not invent new things instead we write through our limitations, that is the limitation of language. Mr. Pinto said that what we are learning in the classroom is just another means of getting ourselves accustomed to the structure and power that exist within the system of the society. He again switched back to the argument of Marshal Melchan, he said that theatre or cinema was not meant for a single person but rather directed towards a crowd. Marshall also challenged the existing form of knowledge which in time to come this knowledge could become non- responsive.

Intentional Fallacy is also defined as confusion between the poem and its origin. New criticism emphasises its importance within the text. A text has three classifications:
Ø Internal Evidence: the evidence is present as the facts of a given work. This includes those things physically present in the work itself.

Ø External Evidence: what is not actually contained in the work itself is external. Statements made privately or published in journals, gazettes about the work, or in conversation, e-mail, etc. External evidence is concerned with the claims about why the artists made the work, lessons external to the fact of the work itself.

Ø Contextual Evidence: assumes what the text eventually meant. Concerns any meaning derived from the specific work’s relationship to other art made by the particular artists. Intentional Fallacy is interconnected with the contextual evidence.

Mr. Pinto positioned us with the argument of the New Historicists. New Historicists believed that:
o We will never know what the intention of the author was.
o The author himself does not know what he meant through his writing.
o Even if the author has the plot, a frame work for the text, he can’t control the direction.
New historicist believe that writing precede thought. The fact that writing is born with thoughts and not followed by it, highlights that thought alone cannot exist outside language. He said this saying that even for a ghost to exist ghosts require a body just like thought require language for expression. He ended his lecture saying that Intentional fallacy tries to locate the “gentle hand of the author” which forces us to read the text in a particular way.

Literature as a Construct

Mr Pinto’s Class Note on THE RISE OF ENGLISH, Terry Eagleton.

7^th July, 09

One of the important arguments in Eagleton’s ‘The Rise Of English’ is that Literature is a construct.

The obvious questions that arise are who constructs it and why is it done? It is certainly done for social, political and cultural reasons by certain influential forces. A prominent example of such a construct is gender identity. We can see the journey gender identity (heterosexuality, incest love, homosexuality to name a few) has taken place throughout the history of literature and how its suppression becomes a construct of social/political control and influence.

Lets trace this back to the much studied Greek tragedy ‘Oedipus The King’ by Sophocles. On unknowingly obliging a prophecy and killing his own father (Laius) and marrying his own mother (Jocasta), Oedipus, King of Thebes, being a fair and just King decides to go into exile after blinding himself. What can be observed is that there is a control exerted by Greek Literature here to suppress a form of sensuality. Mother – Son.

Interestingly, Judith Butler (Gender Trouble) had raised the question as to why the prophecy existed in the first place. Her archive based research showed that Oedipus’ father, Laius, had been engaging with a young boy, the result of which invited the curse of the Gods and hence the prophecy. Here we observe that the sensuality between man and man is being disapproved, suppressed and controlled by suggesting that sexuality of that kind is punishable by the Gods.

Another important Greek tragedy was of Antigone. Antigone was the daughter of Oedipus. Antigone’s conflict with Creon, Oedipus’ brother, arises when Creon declared that the body of Antigone’s brother may not be given a proper burial as he was suspected to have betrayed Thebes. But Antigone wishes to give her brother a proper burial nevertheless and defying Creon’s orders, buries him. Conclusions drawn were that her incestuous love for her brother resulted in her taking a stand against the King and his orders. Clearly, a covert disapproval of incest sensuality between brother and sister.   

All three cases, when studied individually, suggests a taboo against homosexuality and incest through the medium of literature. With the hope of idealizing or supporting heterosexuality? That can be left open to interpretation. There is, however, a certain masculine hegemony being promoted because nowhere does it raise the taboo against female homosexuality (lesbianism). In fact, the subject doesn’t even get addressed in order to be disapproved of. But what is irrefutable is that through a systematic representation and repression of such ideas, ‘illegitimizing’ (for want of a better word) certain kinds of sensualities proves that Literature is indeed a ‘construct’ for socio-political and cultural reasons by powerful social forces.