Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln for II year American Literature Course

Audio link
Wikipedia article

Works of Terry Eagleton

What is Literature?
Literary Theory: An Introduction

II year JPEng and CEP Questions

II year JPEng and CEP -ites may post their questions here. I will respond to them.

----
Let me attempt answers here for the questions asked in the comments section below.


Reg. Liberty Song 
1. The liberty song which I understand became a very popular (pop) song during the last phase of struggle against England leading to declaration of Independence. The Stamp Act became a breaking point which was capitalized by the leaders asking for independence from England. The argument was, since England was not using the money collected from the American colonies for the welfare of the White residents of America, England had not right to collect it. Stamp Act insisted on collecting money by way of stamp on all legal translations and claims.  The Act helped leaders demanding freedom more popular support from the colonies.

The Liberty Song has that background. It was written about three years after the Stamp Act. However, you will find the concern mentioned above in the poem as well. They do not want to pay, if they cannot be taken care of well.

For more on the Stamp Act click here for the wiki article 
------
2. I am not able to understand the second question, hence, apologies. My position is that native american story telling did not become part of any visible, dominant narrative tradition of USA. However, I admit I am subject to correction.
-----
3. Thomas Paine's work is Propaganda writing
For more on that you may click and refer to the following links
a. From 'On Papers.com' 
b. From 'Dream Essays.com'
c.  From enotes
------
4. Links to 'Song of Myself'
a. From 'Sparknotes'
b. From 'Wikipedia'
c. From 'Bookrags'
d. From 'enotes'
-------
5. Links for 'Purloined Letter' as Dark Romantic
a. From Wiki on Dark Romanticism
b. From Passgen : 'What is Dark Romanticism?'
c. From Associated content
-------

Hope this will be some use. All the best.

Guest Lecture on Capitalism/ Capital and related concepts

Notes by Sneha Sharon Mammen:

Dated: 3rd August, 2010

The following has been Mr. Dhar's fragment of understanding on Capital/ Capitalism/ Aesthetics/ Culture, which triggered our minds to think on his lines which was in turn the product of his toil to understand Marx for the past twenty two years. It certainly reaped its own benefits as students of Literature, Economics and Law participated in a four hour involved interactive session with the professor.

Mr. Dhar storms the session with the mind boggling general question as to what ‘Capital’ essentially meant. A shift from Hegel to Marx ( according to lay man understanding) interprets capital as something that can be used as an investment and from which an individual can expect returns. The term is also in day to day circulation as in ‘ I don’t have any capital’. These are varying plausibilities of using the term.

Today we understand capital as per newspaper/stock exchange/finance reports. However, no study of Economics is complete without the premier study of Das Capital, Karl Marx’s foundation guide in writing. Marx, who intended to write six volumes could only leave behind, unfortunately three volumes and a forty pages of the unfinished fourth number. However, the ground work for Das Capital was Grundrisse, a German text of six hundred and fifteen pages again by Marx.

As mentioned earlier economics and its study is incomplete without a study of the giants in this sphere, essentially Marx and his predecessors Adam Smith and Ricardo. The six major volumes of Das Capital were supposed to discuss in detail each broad point. Interestingly, forty pages into the fourth volume, Marx finds himself perplexed and arrives at the conclusion that he has essentially got some angle wrong. Therefore, he sets himself to read further into analyzing the entire situation all over again. This breeds thirty thousand copious pages of unpublished analysis on economy and its working( now in the Marx Engels Archive, Amsterdam). It was Rosa Luxemberg who completed the fifth volume.

Mr. Dhar had the lovely chance to scroll through the first four hundred pages of the full collection of the unpublished version and says that much of it was also on the Indian village conditions, twenty five hundred pages on medicine, hundreds of pages to prove Calsulus wrong and so on. This could also mean that quite visibly politics and culture and economics is tied together and are not essentially varied, thoroughly different terms.

What Marx actually stood against was for the piece meal, segmented understanding of the reality of the world.

Volume one of Marx’s Das Capital talks of Commodity and Production. Marx basically went into studying the intrinsic aspect and property of a commodity. Volume two on the other hand studied Distribution as a step two of the entrance of commodity into the market. However, there was no concept of demand and supply discussed therein. The third volume studied Land and Rent and ended with the ‘nasty word’ as Mr Dhar puts it, ‘Class’. The last chapter of volume three is an attempt to describe what class actually was but it was all in vain. Also, surprisingly enugh, only the first volume talked of labour!!

‘ A patient thinker cannot give all the answers and those who have all the answers are not thinkers’ courtesy Mr Dhar, and hence Marx attempted in vain to define ‘class’.

So when a Terry Eagleton and a Jameson were referring to ‘Capital’ and ‘capitalism’ they were indeed talking about the volumes that they had read and do not deal with it with respect to our present day newspaper understanding of the concept.

So our understanding of capital now moves on to understand that it is not only investment or does not yield returns alone but is also a vicious cycle and Money, Value and Price are essentially very different concepts. However, Marx in volume one of his book describes and establishes relation between all the above mentioned concepts. For example, hundreds of pages were spent in understanding what the term ‘value’ actually catered to.

A non-economic background student pops up a very ontological question at this juncture. ‘ Is there a common entity from where these things are derived from?’ and this leaves us with the discussion as to what were the origins of capital, money and value. What is capital generally looked upon as now and what was its primordial form? These were basically free in nature. For a long time even cattle was used as monetary exchanges. Meaning to say that nobody really has the capital, it is all there out in nature and nature has all the resources.

Taking up a pluralist, heterogeneous example:

What could you possibly do with a mango?

1) You either consume it. There is a segment in our life which is involved with consumption based on need. Everything need not essentially be revolving around buying and selling.

2) Mango seed could produce more mangoes in future and the process of consumption can be multiplied. It is therefore a vicious cycle. ( Indian villages are self sustainable and process like this/ also knowledge multiplies in a similar way)

3) You could use the mango as an exchange commodity for an orange.

4) You could also convert the mango into pickle. (Economics gives us a feeling that everything happens in the market but not actually!) The process has to take place to convert the mango into the pickle and the very fact that there is capital in the world is philosophically naïve.

Seed to mango involves labour too.

The initial mango found free in nature plus human/animal labour leads to capital in this case. Without the intervention of nature therefore nothing becomes possible. Marx traps us that way saying that nothing actually happens without labour.

At this juncture can we consider that capitalism did have two bases: the spread of colonialism and the rise of slavery. The British sold the Burmese teak and the skyscrapers of the west is a result of two hundred years of immense plunder, but, the initial mango was found free in nature and it could be sold without having to pay for it. Today, the mad rush that we see is just a run for the free capital that exists be it the Ambani feud or the Iraq war. Thousands of acres of land in Bengal was bought by the Tata’s for a rupee. Does it then become the free mango?!

0 ( free mango) + x ( money from selling) = x( total profit)

Mango + labour = pickle also involves no harm and again you can earn ‘x’ amount. This has been practiced even today by the self employed. The market then comes only at the last juncture.

Now, supposingly you want to employ another person to do the work, here labour in question would be a commodity which is bought and sold and not a capital.

Therefore, 0 + 2 (remuneration to be paid for labour) = 4 ( selling price)

Total gains from transaction would be ( SP- remuneration) = 2.

Essentially we could also say that not everythings begins with capital. We just have natural resources. ( Natural resources + labour= production)

However, capital by itself cannot do anything and nothing can happen without production( Marx refutes this later in volume second). Marx moves on to derive from Adam Smith and Ricardo to say that Capital is impossible without land and labour.

Volume three suggests that capital never pays rent ( Coca Cola/ Tata’s), and therefore it is a critique of Hegel when he says that there is no capital per se. Whatever you have is either free in nature or plunder and that is where the concomitant history of capitalism lies embedded, what went hand in hand with capitalism in Europe was Colonialism. When in 1857, England was undergoing industrialization, India was facing the Sepoy mutiny and nationalism while Africa at this time was in the clutches of slavery where labour was bought for free ( capital may or may not buy labour!) The essential being of the slave was bought as the white master employ his labour on the cotton fields and sell the efforts of bonded labour( what we now understand it as) worldwide.

Ponder: Is it still happening? Consider the fashion industry, the IPL auctions! In India, bonded labour unfortunately goes the caste way

When do we actually buy and sell labour? When you work in an office for a pay, you are actually selling your labour and the employer who recruits you is the buyer of your labour. At this point, Marx needs to be congratulated for a term that he coined, ‘labour power’ and hence it is labour power that is sold by a worker ( the idea of human capital comes here). It is therefore a need based economy. It is the similar case in our domestic households where everything is need based. It is still an economy because there is exchange in the strictest sense.

For Capitalism to work well the game should run fair; there ought to be buying and selling of labour power but it should be necessarily without any coercion which might otherwise be a condition of slavery.

Value and Price are very different from each other. Price could be infinitely cooked up ( palak paneer in a dhaba would cost only Rs 20 while the same thing might cost 500 in Taj chain of hotels). Marx therefore showed that the wage that the labour gets is the value of labour, both intrinsic and generated and sometimes this value is expressed in monetary forms. Slave labour therefore has value but no price. We could say that essentially everything has value but only a few have price tags attached to it.

For example lets say:

Leather ( value 1) + labour ( value 2) + Vx ( x being the work employed by labour on the leather) = shoe (value 3)

There is therefore an exchange,

C’ – C= profits

C’ –C = delta C ( which is capital according to Marx, both static or variable)

Now, C + delta C = C” ; capital can therefore be generated by production. Is capital therefore accumulated labour?

Example, The share market.

Again, production need not always take place, you buy shoes in Lisbon for C, sell it in Singapore for C’.

Capitalism was also born with a single universal language. Meaning to say that a mango should be a mango everywhere else and this is where the concept of brand comes in and interstingly enough, potato an import from Latin America and idli from Indonesia is doing so well in India!

The capitalists in modern cultures is the bourgeois and the working class therefore becomes the proletariat. India has a mixed economy. However, the term is not thoroughly a transparent term. India is a capitalistic+ slave + feudal +need based economy. That is how it is decentralized and therefore not the whole of India can be either capitalistic or agrarian.

It was therefore a ladder progression, where the bottoms of the ladder was pre capital, rural, agricultural and pre modern and with a shift in time period constituting development we moved on to capital, the west, modern, the urban and industrial and at the end of it Capitalism becomes an ideology and not a fact. “ Ideology is seeing yourself in the mirror and believing that it is you although the image that is formed is laterally inverted” and some people actually live this ideology and they are the capitalists- the bourgeois who lives in this illusion. However, collective hallucinations and illusions are part of everyone’s life! The illusion lived during the feudal periods was that the monarch was Godsent.

This is why culture and economy should go along. It was the proletariat who critiqued the ideology. The present interest in Marx is not because of him along but because of other perspectives too. Even the feminist corners of the woman labour question has generated interest.

Workplace – selling labour- consumer becoming the proletariat. There is no final bourgeois in that sense of the word.

Twenty four hundred pages run in from volume one concerning commodity to volume three where Marx talks of class/proletariat/labour. He saw that the commodity (shoe) in the market was sold for Rs 8 and tried finding out the price of leather for the capitalist and it was found that he paid only Rs 2. Another Rs 2 was used in employing labour and therefore the value increment is ( 8- (2+2) ) =4

Which is delta C , that is profits in mainstream economics. Now Marx’s question was, ( 2+2) has value and the Non Performing Appropriator (NPA) has value. V1 +V2 ----) V3 and in this case 4 is the value increment. Value is added because V2 worked on V1 ( Vx) to generate the final product that is V3.

Value + added value = 8- 2= 6

6 – labour charges( 2)= 4 ( surplus value) and this is called exploitation. Who decides where the surplus value goes? It is the producer, the one who generated value in the first place. Aesthetics in cultural studies has been dominated by NPA’s and that is why we have an Oscar Wilde or a Virginia Woolf or the Bronte sisters!

In the quest of allocation of surplus value, there is a power/ political struggle. The social and the cultural are also deciding factors. The producer may even choose to spend the entire surplus in a casino within a day or might even channelise it as social security, hospitals etc. No true appreciation of aesthetics can happen here.

At home, the mother converts the cauliflower into cauliflower curry. Here no price is attached but value is surely generated. The feminists put forth their need for respect and recognition and a share in labour for the services she renders. However, the final product is not a commodity here. Capitalism is a process which engages in buying of labour and means plus products which yields the final commodity.

Historically, some people have lived on other people’s labour, can we all labour together now?

The ethical aesthetic question therefore is HOW TO LIVE? What is it to be cultured? Living out of someone else’s labour is not shared living at all. No amount of cosmopolitanism marks culture and Terry Eagleton says that an oppressive society is not a condition of culture.

Studying the woman question, the labour of a woman cannot be brought under the realm of capitalism if she is doing it for her family, however the curry that she cooks if generated in the market through catering can make her a capitalist and since she is in no contractual bond to either cook or clean the house as labour is in capitalistic economy, the two spheres are thoroughly different.

Lecture by: Anup Kumar Dhar, 3 August, 2010 at Christ University.

Framing Questions - An Approach/ MA Previous

Notes by Shilpi Rana

Asking questions or we can say rather good questions is all the more important even than providing answers.Pinto Sir made us acquainted with the types of consequences of the questions raised.He said that asking questions is the first step to become a "scholar".

To explain the art of preparing questions we took THE GENERAL PROLOGUE of Chaucer's THE CANTERBURY TALES and we were asked to prepare questions on it.Some of the questions raised were as follows :

- How is the fourteenth century society portrayed through the characters in THE CANTERBURY TALES?

- Elaborate on the literary devices in THE CANTERBURY TALES.

- Describe the stratification of the societythrough the analysis of the characters in THE CANTERBURY TALES.

- Are Chaucer's characters his own voice?

- Describe the influence of the church in THE CANTERBURY TALES.

- How is the concept of morality depicted in THE CANTERBURY TALES?

- What are the medieval concepts of literature engaged in THE CANTERBURY TALES?

- Is there more positive characters than negative characters in THE CANTERBURY TALES?

- Discuss the concept of eroticism in THE CANTERBURY TALES.

- How is the corruption of the church portrayed in THE CANTERBURY TALES?

After the above questions we had, we were explained what type of questions should be asked as we being postgraduate students.

CONCLUSION :

- Ask questions which can make a long arguement. The answer of the question asked should not be a short and straight away answer, it should have a good content and should go on for pages. We can add "Discuss" or "Elaborate" or "Elucidate" to the questions.

- We must keep the time frame in mind while asking questions. Do not impose concepts which the time does not permit. Ask questions on the literary concepts used during the time and its impact on the then society.

- Ask questions on the literary techniques on the part of the author. What is the research area of the author and how is the work received by society as a whole, by the readers and as well as by us individually. For eg. In which genre of work does THE CANTERBURY TALES fall into - Is it novel, poem, epic, drama, etc.? The answer would be it is a Frame Narrative(where there are many stories within a story) like the stories of PANCHATANTRA, VIKRAM BETAAL , ARABIAN NIGHTS etc.

- Ask questions making an interplay of the characters in the text.

- Raise questions on the debates appeared in the text itself.

- Ask questions on the author's perspective itself.

These were some of the useful tips on how to frame correct questions even in order to perceive the text well.

Philis Wheatly

Phillis Wheatly (1753-1784)

Phillis Wheatly was a kidnapped African slave child who was sold from the South Market in Boston to a well to do Susanna Wheatly. In her childhood she experienced special, much indulged comfort and only token slavery. She quickly learned Latin, English and the Bible and began writing in 1764. Her poems were based on the themes of morality and piety, along with patriotic American pieces, an epithalamium, and a short racially self conscious poem, “Thoughts on being brought from Africa and America”.

Initially her poems were not published as the subscribers felt that it was part racially motivated. With the prestigious co-operation of Countess of Huntingdon and Susanna Wheatly, her book was published in London in 1773. This was the first volume known to have been published by a black American, man or woman. Her poems have elements of neoclassical poetic norms.

Her poems represent a deeply self conscious art. Her sense of herself as an African and an American makes her in some way a dual provincial in relationship to the eighteen century Anglo-Atlantic cosmopolitan centre. The language of poem is both American (refines English) and African (non refined and broken English) in nature.

Her poems included not only Christian elegies, but also highly original English translations from the Latin of Ovid, biblical paraphrases and poems about nature, imagination and memory. She was highly influenced by the Bible.

On Being Brought from Africa to America

In just eight lines, Wheatley describes her attitude towards her condition of enslavement -- both coming from Africa to America, and the culture that considers her color so negatively. Wheatley begins by crediting her slavery as a positive, because it has brought her to Christianity. She makes a clear distinction between God (frightening and fearful) and Saviour( hope). The word "benighted" means "overtaken by night or darkness" or "being in a state of moral or intellectual darkness." Thus, she makes her skin color and her original state of ignorance of Christian redemption parallel situations.

She credits "mercy" with her voyage -- but also with her education in Christianity. Both were actually at the hands of human beings. In turning both to God, she reminds her audience that there is a force more powerful than they are -- a force that has acted directly in her life. She cleverly distances her reader from those who "view our sable race with scornful eye" -- perhaps thus nudging the reader to a more critical view of slavery or at least a more positive view of those who are slaves. She directly talks about the Europeans treatment to the African community.

"Sable" , refers to a self-description of her color which is very valuable and desirable. This characterization contrasts sharply to the "diabolic die" of the next line, as it means poisonous evil color. In the second-to-last line, the word "Christian" is placed ambiguously. She may either be addressing her last sentence to Christians -- or she may be including Christians in those who "may be refined" and find salvation. She reminds her reader that Negroes may be saved. The implication of her last sentence is also this: the "angelic train" will include both white and black. She believes that everyone is entitled to redemption.

The poem is biblical in nature, and we can say that she criticizes Africa at some point and also she talks about African from an outsider point of view. She distances herself from her pagan land (Africa) as she is now civilized. Although we can say that Wheatly re-defines Christianity, she believes that Africans can be redeemed. There was notion of Africans being referred to ‘cians’, which believed that Africans can never be redeemed of their sins. Thus, at a certain level it can be said that it is ‘anti Christian’ in nature as it defies the norms of the Bible.

Phillis Wheatley takes on the role of one who has the right to command: a teacher, a preacher, even perhaps a master or mistress( saviour).In looking at Wheatley's attitude towards slavery in her poetry, it's also important to note that most of Phillis Wheatley's poems do not refer to her "condition of servitude".

On Imagination

Wheatly personifies Imagination as a woman, a queen. The thyme scheme of the poem is aabbccdd. This poem stands as an ode in praise of Imagination.

“Thy wond’rous acts in beauteous order stand”. He praises beauty and glorifies the creation- creation of poetry. This poem is the form of invocation in order to justify the sacredness of Imagination. Wheatly draws a comparison between ‘Fancy’ and ‘Imagination’. She says that fancy is ordinary in nature which has the capacity to only capture one’s mind. Also ‘fancy’ can be tampered whith, while Imagination is very powerful, it has an element of ‘fascination’ about it. “Such is thy pow’r, nor are thine orders vain”. Also, fancy can’t be remembered while imagination lasts longer and at times is forever itched in our memory.

She raises the level of Imagination to the divine god himself and claims that Imagination has pinions, wings to soar high. “And leave the rolling universe behind”. There is a reference of Galileo’s theory which states that the world is round. “There in one view we grasp the mighty whole”, there is reference to view everything as a whole, there is a sense of holistic view about every minute detail. “Leader of mental train”, thoughts or mind have the ultimate power, the ultimate sovereign ruler about whom we have to bow.

Wheatly urges her soul to rise and contemplate the majesty of God through the vastness and orderliness of his creation. Though God himself is unseen, he is made manifest in the heavens and the earth through such powerful objects as the sun. Wheatley takes the grandeur of the cosmos as proof of God's sublime, divine imagination. The poem is shaped by the pattern of day's light being following by night's darkness and the return of daylight on the following morning. Humans and the vegetative world require the productive light of the day and the restorative darkness of night, so God is not only powerful but also merciful. The poem ends with Reason and Love, personified, asking what most shows forth almighty God. The poet's answer is that everywhere one looks one sees God's infinite love made visible; humans know him through their senses. Reason falters and fails in the face of the Eternal. All that is left is for humans to praise and worship.

I MA Western Aesthetics Coursework Text Maps

'When was Modernism' - Raymond Williams

I MA Western Aesthetics Questions - On the Texts outside the Coursework

Please post your questions in the comment section below. While posting, first, write the name of the essay along with the author'/s' name/s. Below that write two questions on the essay you are engaging. If you have any clarifications to seek, please post them as well.

I MA Western Aesthetics Questions - On the Texts from the Coursework

Please post your questions in the comment section below. While posting first write the name of the essay along with the author'/s' name/s. Below that write two questions on the essay you are engaging. If you have any clarifications to seek, please post them as well.

Creative Writers and Daydreaming -Sigmund Freud

Click here to download Sigmund Freud's essay "Creative Writers and Daydreaming" 

Call for Papers: National Conference on Communication Skills

Dates: 9-10 August 2010

Organized by Department of Humanities, C.R.Engineering College, Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh

Research papers on the following sub-themes are invited:

1. Effective Listening, Speaking, Writing and Reading
2. Functional English
3. Grammar Teaching- New Methodology
4. Language Learning and Teaching by writing Computer Assisting Software
5. Any other area related to communication skills in English
6. Increasing Employability with Communication Skills
7. Technology Enabled Language Learning.
 
Contact details:
 
Professor A Ranganath Jee, HoD-H&S 
Email: ranganathprof_avvaru at yahoo.co.in 
Ms Sai Lakshmi Yadav, Coordinator 
Email: sailakshmiyadav at rocketmail.com
 
Chadalawada Ramanamma Engineering College, Renigunta Road, Tirupati - 517506
Phone: 0 9440373426,   09885032504 


Courtesy: ELTeCS

National Workshop on Writing up for Thesis and Publications

Dates:  4 & 5 September 2010
 
Organised by the Department of English, PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore
 
ELIGIBILITY:
Faculty and Research Scholars from all disciplines of Engineering / Arts and Science / Polytechnic Colleges
 
REGISTRATION FEE: 
Rs. 1,000/- for Faculty
Rs.750/- for Research Scholars
 
The last date for the receipt of filled - in registration form is 25 August 2010. 

Since the entries are restricted to 60, registrations will be on first come, first serve basis. 

CONTACT DETAILS:

Dr. S. Chandrakanthi / Ms. R. Kalpana, 
Coordinators, 
Two - day Workshop on Writing up for Thesis and Publications, Department of English, PSG College of Technology, Peelamedu, Coimbatore - 641 004.
 
For more details, please visit the websitehttp://www.psgtech.edu/NWO.pdf   

Courtesy: ELTeCS

Call for Papers for Journal of NELTA

First published in 1996,  NELTA Journal is a premiere publication of Nepal English Language Teachers' Association (NELTA). 

The editorial board would like to invite contributions for the 2010 issue of the journal. We encourage contributors to make their work relevant to classroom teaching as well as to serve the larger purpose of creating or promoting ELT discourses at local, national, and regional contexts. 

The objective of this volume is to gather the voices of teachers, scholars, and educationists who are best able to define and advance the conversation and practice of ELT. 

Details of Submission Guidelines and Peer Review Guidelines are available at: http://neltajournal.pbworks.com/

Deadline: September 30, 2010. 

If you have any question, please write to neltajournal at gmail.com


Courtesy: ELTeCS

Sixth International Seminar on ELT in a Changing World: Innovative Approaches to New Challenges

Dates: 29 & 30 January 2011

Organised by Centre of English Language, Aga Khan University Institute for Educational Development 

Abstract Submission 

Participants are invited to submit abstracts for their presentations latest by 30 August 2010. Letters of acceptance will be e-mailed to selected speakers by the beginning of October 2010.

Types of Submission:

1.      Paper presentation
2.      Workshop
3.      Poster presentations

For more details on the abstract and presentation, please visit:http://www.aku.edu/events/cel2011/pdf/Guidelines_for_Completing_the_Abstract_Form_2011_FV.pdf

Contact information:
Ms Faiza Saleem, Ms Shaista Bano Zaidi
Seminar Coordinators
Centre of English Language 
Aga Khan University Institute for Educational Development 
1-5/B-VII, F.B. Area, Karimabad, P.O. Box 13688, Karachi-75950, Pakistan
Phone: +92 21 3634 7611-4, 3683 6001-4 Ext: 4258/4259
Fax: +92 21 3634 7616 
Email: cel.seminar at aku.edu
Website: www.aku.edu/events/cel2011

Courtesy: ELTeCs

Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free | Open Culture

Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free | Open Culture