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Monday, March 12, 2007

As the Philosophy course concludes....

A big thank you to all of you for enthusiastically participating in the Philosophy course. I am sure the course has benefited you immensely.

Personally, it is an emotional moment for me. I have lost count of the various programes I have organised for my students in the past. But this was special in that it was neither fashionable to have philosophy course nor was it considered 'current', 'relevant', 'useful' by anyone I spoke to. Your response and support only encourages me to go ahead with the dreams that I dream. Thanks a million. I hope and earnestly request you that you take what you have picked up/learnt ahead in your own little ways.

I thank Sundar for being so flexible and approachable. It's rare that a person of his caliber is also so approachable. I wish that many more youngsters across Bangalore benefit from him.
I must thank Fr Principal and Fr Vaghese for their support. They have gone beyond the institutional constraints to have this course. For those of you who are not aware, this is the only certificate course happening outside the regular certificate programmes. In that way it is a special concession offered by the college.

Can't forget Padmakumar and Solomon who have been always there to manage the arrangements so that I could attend my law classes or some seminar/workshop somewhere. I owe a special debt of gratitude to them. I also appreciate their eagerness to learn new things and pray this spirit spreads among other staff as well.

Thanks to ever-encouraging Kennedy, my HOD, for permitting to have the course under the banner of the dept.

I wish that you come up with suggestions to see how we can move forward from here
I am organising a course in Art and Architecture criticism for three days between 15 and 20 April 2007. Those of you who are interested may get in touch with him. The course will be taught by Kaiwan Mehta, himself a pracising art and architecture critic, journalist and professor or architecture.

Good luck for 5000 word essay!

anil

IFEP Writing skill model Question paper

END SEMESTER EXAMINATION APRIL - 2007

II SEMESTER

Model Question Paper

Course: BA Marks: 50

Subject: Introduction to Writing Skills Time: 2 Hours

I. In the following paragraphs identify the topic sentence, the supporting sentences, and the concluding sentence. (5 x 2=10)

1. In times gone by, lions lived in Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa. Humans killed hundreds of lions either out of fear or for sport. When areas were cleared to make towns and villages, lions and other animals were killed in large numbers. Now there are no lions left in the Middle East or Northern Africa. Lions can be found in Asia and the Eastern part of Central Africa. They are mostly found in zoos or national parks.

2. In these modern times we live a fast-paced life. We speed on highways that never end, take jet planes to travel faster. Fast food restaurants save us time. Our machines are working faster than ever, and we can enjoy more leisure time. Then, in our leisure time, we grumble because things move too slowly.

II. Write a paragraph each for the following types. (2x5=10)

(Evaluation criteria: Knowledge of paragraph type, paragraph structure, spelling, grammar)

  1. Cause and effect
  2. Argumentative
  3. Process
  4. Descriptive
  5. Narrative

III. Read the following passages and identify paragraph type. Do not rewrite the passage.

(2x5=10)

1. The old store lightened by 360 watts bulbs, smelled of coal oil and baking bread. In the middle of the rectangular room, where the oak flow sagged a little, stood an iron stove. To the right was a wooden table with an unfinished game of checkers and a stool made from an apple – tree stump. On shelves around the walls sat earthen jugs with corncob stoppers, a few canned goods and some of the 2000 old clocks and clock works Thurmond watts owned. Only one was ticking; the others he just looked at.

2. The young man started out to look for wood. It was not long before he saw wood that would make a beautiful warm fire, and he began to busy himself gathering the wood. Suddenly he felt the presence of the owl. The owl reached down and put the young man in its ear. The young man strung his bow and fitted one of his arrows, letting it fly from his bow deep into the ear of the owl. And the young man was free.

3. You enter with a violin and prepare to play some lovely music. Taking out a pocket handkerchief you fold it carefully and place it on your shoulder as a violin rest. You then put the violin under your chin on your left shoulder ( or vice versa if you are left handed). Drawing the bow back on the strings, you suddenly send the bow flying offstage into the wings like an arrow! Dismayed, you produce a second a bow and repeat the action, launching the bow offstage as well. You investigate the violin and discover the elastic strings, reacting with either embarrassment and delight.

4. The great increase in the free black population in America came after the Revolutionary War. In appreciation of the service of some 5000 blacks in the War for independence and as a result of the libertarian and egalitarian spirit that the declaration of independence and the war inspired, many masters, especially Northerners, freed their slaves. Soon individual states in the North decreed the gradual abolition of the institutions, beginning with Vermont’s action in 1777. In 1776 the population of United States was about two and a half million, more than 500,000 back slaves and approximately 40,000 free blacks. More than one half of these free blacks lived in the south. The revolutionary leaders, including Washington and Jefferson anticipated a constitution of the trend toward emancipation until eventually slavery would disappear from the land. This expectation was to be drowned, almost literally, by the whirring noise of Eli Whiney’s cotton gin. The invention of this native of Massachusetts made cotton production increasingly profitable and caused rapid and substantial increases in the slave population, so that on the eve of Civil War they were four million black slaves in the South.

5. To begin with, dinosaurs fell into two groups: the bird-hipped ones or ornithischians, and the reptile-hipped ones, saurischians. The bird-hipped dinosaurs were almost all herbivorous or plant-eaters, while the reptile-hippped group contained both meat eaters and plant eaters.

IV. Write an essay on any ONE of the following topics in about 600 words. (10x1=10)

(Evaluation criteria: Knowledge of essay structure, paragraph structure, spelling, grammar, punctuation, development of ideas, language)

  1. A sound knowledge of political science, sociology and economics is crucial to become a competent journalist/media person.
  2. Students of humanities and social sciences are more important for an inclusive and humanistic growth of societies.
  3. Social evils like caste and gender discriminations do not disappear; they only change forms.
  4. Indian society in 2020.
  5. Bollywood films and the Indian Diaspora

V. Prepare a bibliography of the following books and articles using recent MLA or APA styles. (Evaluation criteria: Knowledge bibliography formats) (1x5=5)

  1. Benedict Anderson. Book: Imagined Communities. Published in London by Verso in 1991
  2. Bill Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin. Editors. Book: The Post Colonial Reader. Published in London/New York by Routledge in 1995.
  3. Felix Wilfred. Article: ‘Publishing History of the Bible’. Published in the The Hindu. on 02 Oct. 2001
  4. John J Kenndy, Abhaya, Anil Pinto, Shaila Gaur, Sudhamshu. Book: Perspectives Published by Oxford in Banglore in 2007
  5. Mrinalini Sebastian. Article Understadning culture. Updated on 7 Febraury 2006. Accessed on 5 February 2007. URL: http://cscsarchive.org/courses/ugdip05/paper1/mod1/

VI Prepare a research proposal on any ONE of the following topics. In about 150-200 words (5x1-5)

(Evaluation criteria: Knowledge of proposal format, quality of research areas identified and formulated, grammar, spelling, punctuation)

  1. The impact of mobile phones on communication among youth
  2. Communicative English syllabus
  3. Impact of Rang De Basanti on politics in India
  4. Multilingualism and contemporary media in Bangalore
  5. Impact of autonomy in education in the college
  6. TV viewing habits among college going students
  7. Impact of Harry Potter on school children
  8. Use of library by students
  9. Emerging trends in FM radio
  10. Elite academic institutions and their attitude towards student from slums

IFEP minor thesis evaluation

Dept of Media Studies

Christ College (Autonomous), Bangalore

FEP

Communicative English Paper IV

Introduction to Writing Skills

MINOR THESIS EVALUATION

Viva 10 + Thesis 15 = 25

Viva

Viva will try to understand the genuineness of the student work and the learning outcome by posing questions on

1. The research method

2. Analysis

3. Understanding of the conclusions drawn

Thesis

Thesis will be evaluated by Felix and Anil which will be then be ratified by the external examiners based on the viva and the re-examination of the thesis.

Thesis Evaluation criteria:

1. Content : Presentation Analysis of the research issue and conclusion

2. Understanding of research report format

3. Language: Grammar, spelling, punctuation, style

For clarification please contact Anil Pinto or Felix

Sunday, January 28, 2007

Introduction to Writing Skills Qestion Paper model

CHRIST COLLEGE, BANGALORE – 560029

(AUTONOMOUS)

MID SEMESTER EXAMINATION JAN/FEB - 2007

II SEMESTER

Course: BA – Communicative English Marks: 50

Subject: Introduction to Writing Skills Time: 2 Hours

I. In the following paragraphs identify the topic sentence, the supporting sentences, and the concluding sentence.

1

2

II. Write a paragraph each for the following types. (4x5=20)

(Evaluation criteria: Knowledge of paragraph type, paragraph structure, spelling, grammar, and punctuation)

1

2

3

4

III. Read the following passages and identify the paragraph type. Do not rewrite the passages.

(5x1=5)

1

2

3

4

5

IV. Write an essay on any ONE of the following topics in about 600 words. (1x15=15)

(Evaluation criteria: Knowledge of essay structure, paragraph structure, spelling, grammar, punctuation, development ideas, language)

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

All the best

Monday, January 01, 2007

Certificate Course in Philosophy

Prof Sundar Sarukkai of National Institute of Advanced Studies ( NIAS), Indian Institute of Science Campus, Bangalore, and I are in a dialogue to begin a short term course in Philosophy.

The course as it is planned now would deal with, in Part A, basic concepts of Philosophy like Metaphysics, Epistemology, Logic, Ontology, Philosophy of Language, and in Part B Philosophy of Art, or Science, or Social Science.

We intend to keep the classes on Saturday afternoons may be from 2 to 6 in the months of January and February either at Indian Institute of Science, or Christ College. The course fee would be between Rs 500 or 750 or 1000 to meet the photocopying expenses of the reading material and remuneration. A certificate would be given either from NIAS or jointly by NIAS and Christ College. The second option is yet to be negotiated with the college.

The course is open to all the undergraduate and postgraduate students of all educational institutions of Bangalore, interested in Philosophy and its application in today’s world.

I understand, Prof Sarukkai has taught a similar course in Philosophy for the public of Bangalore, in Kabban park!! The course attracted about 40 enthusiastic participants then from diverse fields.

Presently, Prof. Sarukkai heads the Centre for Philosophy and teaches at the School of Humanities at NIAS. You may access his profile at

Prof Sarukkai would be the main resource Person and designer of the course.

I wish to know how many of you would be interested in joining the course.

Your feedback on the course content, fee structure, duration, timing and any other related issues is welcome.

A course in Philosophy is a rare one. So I strongly recommend it to you all.

Do respond by 7 January 2007 to: ajpinto42@yahoo.co.in or ajpinto42@gmail.com. I reply to emails within 24 hours. If you haven’t received my reply within this time, it means I haven’t received your email.

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Semiotics Proposals

You may post your Semiotics Proposals here.

My Semiotic Proposal

Construction of South Canara in the Cyberspace: A Semiotic Analysis

A land gets constructed in numerous ways in the public domain. It can be a drawing on a map, a geographical location described with reference to other landmasses or water bodies or in terms of cultural practices. This however gets represented in different media with each medium constructing it within its possibilities. These media could be folk narratives, gossips, TV, cinema, theatre, newspapers, literature, Radio or internet. The construction of land in each of these medium is contingent on the limitation of each of these medium and the ownership of the medium at the level of the sender.

South Canara has been constructed differently in terms of history, mythology, cultural artefacts, landscape, demography, and social relationships in different media down the centuries. One of the relatively new medium in which it is being constructed is the internet though websites. The place is described in websites of the State, NGOs, educational institutions, tourism firms, print and online media, and web pages of individuals.

This paper tries to analyze the way the internet, where possibilities of many other media converge, constructs the place. It will analyse the myths, metaphors, social meanings, discourses, mediations, stereotypes, ideologies, power, hegemony, representations that are present or surface in the different visual, textual, colour, sound symbols, and codes that the portals employ in the construction of the place.


Select Bibliography

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trs. Annette Lavers. London: Vintage, 1993.

Thwaites, Tony et al. Introducing Cultural and Media Studies. London: Palgrave, 2002.

Watson, James. Media Communication: An Introduction to Theory and Process. 2 ed. London: Palgrave, 2003.

<http://www.daaiz.com/>

<http://www.daijiworld.com/home.asp>

<http://www.soans.com/index.htm>

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Blogs vs Orkut (Social Network Service

Hi All,
Of late i have a feeling that orkut or Social Network services will be a major challenge for blogging. Since 85% of blogging is personal blogging, and orkut is more interactive and allows more networking (or so i assume) Blogging, atleast personal blogging, is passe'. From my personal experience, i see that present first years are not as excited about blogging as th last years final year students were. Among my firt year fep stuents out of 73, 37 are orkuting. That is about 50% I also find that i am able to communicate and inteact with them faster and better than say with the last year final years, owing to orkut.
Please find some time to quickly respond to this. you may give me your immediate impressions thorugh email or post on my orkut site or blog.
Waiting for you exciting or otherwise replies.
anil

Saturday, October 07, 2006

Feedback, please!

Hi All,

I hope you are back at home/rooms relaxed. I wish to have your feedback on the exam. Do start posting your views on my blog http://anilpinto.blogspot.com or email me.

You may also give suggestions on how the exam could have been done differently. Please be aware that your views are very precious as they will have an impact on the ‘fate’ of your next year’s friends.

Also planning to change the name of the paper. The present title is too long. Any suggestions?

On the whole I was happy with your performance. But felt that all those lectures on platform roles didn’t seem to have had an impact. The don’ts were hardly adhered to. However, for me, they have given better insights as to how I can change the way I go about the classes for next year’s batch as well as the exams. (But, I must admit that some of you were awesome.)

A reminder. For the Applied Phonetics and Communication Skills written exam, in the last section you might be asked to transcribe the passage to IPA apart for marking stress and intonation and dividing the tone groups. You need not transcribe it. But do mark the stress, tone groups and intonation.

I wish you all the best for the Psychology practical exam as well as the written exams ahead.

Take care.

Anil

Documentary Film Making Course at Mangalore

Dept of Journalism, St Aloysius College, Mangalore is organising a seven-day Documentary film Making Workshop. Those interested can get in touch with me. Click on the following link for further details.

http://richardrego.wordpress.com/2006/10/04/documentary-film-making-workshop/

Friday, October 06, 2006

I Sem FEP Comm Practicals Oct 2006 groups

DEPARTMENT OF MEDIA STUDIES

CHRIST COLLEGE (AUTONOMOUS), BANGALORE - 29

END SEMESTER PRACTICALS

PAPER II

APPLIED PHONETICS AND COMMUNICATION SKILLS

OCTOBER 07, 2006,

Venue: Conference Hall

Time: 9 am to 5.30 pm

GROUPS FOR THE PRACTICAL EXAMINATIONS

GROUP ONE

Register numbers: 06D3001, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08.

GROUP TWO

Register numbers: 06D3010, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17

GROUP THREE

Register numbers: 06D3018, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26

GROUP FOUR

Register numbers: 06D3027, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34

GROUP FIVE

Register numbers: 06D3035, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43

GROUP SIX

Register numbers: 06D3044, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51

GROUP SEVEN

Register numbers: 06D3052, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59

GROUP EIGHT

Register numbers: 06D3060, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67

GROUP NINE

Register numbers: 06D3068, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77

DEPARTMENT OF MEDIA STUDIES

CHRIST COLLEGE (AUTONOMOUS), BANGALORE - 29

End Semester Practicals

Paper II

Applied Phonetics and Communication Skills

October 07, 2006

PART I: GROUP DISCUSSION

Instructions:

· Have a group discussion in the given group for twenty minutes on the given topic

· A moderator will be appointed

· Maximum Marks 10 per person

· Evaluation Criteria: Communicative skills, knowledge of the subject, Language of agreement and disagreement, listening, body language, moderation

PART II :ASSEMBLIES

Instructions:

· Make a presentation in the given group on the given occasion

· Time limit 25-30 minutes

· Maximum Marks 15

· Evaluation Criteria: Organisation skills, communication skills, crisis management, teamwork, time management

Date: 30 Sept 2006

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Feminist Criticism

Feminist Criticism

Feminism is a diverse collection of social theories, political movements, and moral philosophies, largely motivated by or concerning the experiences of women, especially socially, politically, and economically. As a social movement, feminism largely focuses on limiting or eradicating gender inequality and promoting women's rights, interests, and issues in society.Feminism as a self-aware, concerted approach entered literature in 1960’s. However about two centuries of struggle preceeds it. Beginning with Mary Wollsonecrafts – A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), Margaret Fuller (Am)- Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), John Stuart Mill – The Subjection of Women (1869) Today feminist literary criticism closely linked to movement by political feminists for social, economic and cultural freedom and equality.Virginia Woolf novelist, an important precursor feminist criticism, wrote numerous essays on women authors and on the cultural, economic, and educational disabilities within ‘patriarchal’ society that have prevented women from realising their creative possibilities. Her important work: A Room of One’s Own (1929)Simone de Beauvoir (French) in her The Second Sex (1949) presents a critique of cultural identification of women merely as negative object or other to ‘man’ as the defining and dominating ‘subject’ who is assumed to represent humanity in general. She also dealt with great collective myths of women in the works of many male writers. In US modern feminism began with Mary Ellman’s Thinking about Women (1968) through witty discussion of derogatory stereotypes of women in literature written by men. She also presented alternative, subversive points of view in some writings of women.Kale Millets – Sexual Politics (1969)- ‘Politics’ – mechanisms that express and enforce the relations of power in society. She discussed how western social arrangements and institutions as covert ways manipulating power to establish and perpetuate the dominance of men and subordination of women. She attacked the male bias in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and analysed selected passages by D H Lawrence showing how they aggrandise their aggressive phallic selves and degrade selves and degrade women as submissive sexual objects. Since 1969 there has been explosion of feminist writings unparalleled in the previous history of critical innovation as it displays urgency and excitement of a religious awakening. However, there is no unitary theory of procedures in US, England and France and other countries. There is a lot of variety like psychoanalytic, Marxist and diverse post-structuralist with intense debate within them. Various feminism share assumptions and concepts that constitute common ground for the diverse ways that individual critics explore the factor of sexual differences and privilege in the production, the form and content, the reception and critical analysis and evaluation of works of literature. o Subtypes of feminismo Amazon feminismo Anarcha-Feminismo Anti-racist feminismo cultural feminismo ecofeminismo equity feminismo existentialist feminismo French feminismo gender feminismo individualist feminism (also known as libertarian feminism)o lesbian feminismo liberal feminismo male feminism or men's feminismo Marxist feminism (also known as socialist feminism)o material feminismo pop feminismo post-colonial feminismo postmodern feminism which includes queer theoryo pro-sex feminism (also known as sexually liberal feminism, sex-positive feminism)o psychoanalytic feminismo radical feminismo separatist feminismo socialist feminismo spiritual feminismo standpoint feminismo third-world feminismo transnational feminismo transfeminismo womanismo Certain actions, approaches and people can also be described as proto-feminist or post-feminist.Common grounds:1. Western civilisation is pervasively patriarchal – It is male centred, controlled, organised, conducted to subordinate women to men in all cultural domains: familial, religious, political, economic, social, legal, artistic. Hebrew Bible, Greek philosophy to present: female defined by negative reference, to the male as the human norm hence the other, non-man, by her lack of the identifying male organ, of male powers, and of the male characters traits presumed to have achieved the most important inventions and works of civilisations and culture. Women socialised to resign to patriarchal ideology (conscious and unconscious presuppositions and male superiority) and conditioned to derogate their own sex and to cooperate in their own subordination. E.g. NDTV ‘We the People’ Dress code.2. Though sex is determined by anatomy the prevailing concepts of gender- of the traits that constitute what is masculine and what is feminine are largely cultural constructs. Created by the patriarchal biases of the civilisation. Simone de Beauvoir: ‘One is not born, but becomes, a woman … it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature…. which is described as feminine.’Masculine identified as active, dominating, adventurous, rational, creative; the feminine by systematic opposition to such traits, as passive, acquiescent, timid, emotional, and conventional. 3. The patriarchal/masculinist /andro-centric ideology pervades great literary works mostly written by men. Highly regarded classics focus on male protagonists- Oedipus, Ulysses, Hamlet, Tom Jones, Captain Ahab, Huck Finn- embody masculine traits and ways of feeling and pursue masculine interests in masculine fields of action. To them female characters are marginal and subordinate, complementary, opposite to masculine desires and enterprises. They lack female role models, are addressed to male readers. They either make woman alien outsider or make her take the position of the male subject, male values, and ways of perceiving, feeling, and acting. Critical theories, traditional aesthetic categories presumed to be objective, disinterested and universal are fused with masculine assumptions, interests and ways of reasoning. Rankings, critical treatments are gender-based. Feminist critics in English-speaking countries attempt to reconstitute all the ways we deal with literature to do justice to female points of views, concerns and values. They try to alter ways of reading of the past to make her a Resisting Reader (Judith Fetterley, 1978) to resist the author’s intensions and design in order by a ‘revisionary reading’ bringing to light and countering the sexual biases written into a literary work. To find ‘images of women’ in the novels and poems of men. They fall into two antithetic patterns. One side- idealised projection of men’s desires (the Madonna, the Muse of arts, Dante’s Beatrice, the pure and innocent virgin, the ‘Angel in the House’ that was represented by the Victorian poet Coventry Patmore). The other side: demonic projections of men’s sexual resentments and terrors (Eve and Pandora as the sources of all evil, destructive sensual temptresses such as Delilah and Circe, the malign witch, the castrating mother) Though some decry literature written by men for its depiction of women as marginal docile and subservient to men’s interests and emotional needs and fears, male writers like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Samuel Richardson, Henrick Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw have managed to raise above the sexual prejudices of their time sufficiently to understand and present the cultural pressures that have shaped the characters of women and forced upon them their negative or subsidiary social roles. Some feminists are not concerned with woman as reader but gynocriticism. Gynocriticism: Elaine Showalter- criticism concerns itself with developing specifically female framework for dealing with works written by women in terms of production, motivation and analysis, interpretation in all literary forms, including journals and letters. Important books of this mode: Patricia Meyer Spacks: The Female Imagination (1975), on major women novelists and poets in England, America, and France; Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (1977)Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) Stresses the psychodynamics of women writers in the 19th century.The authors propose the ‘anxiety of authorship’ that resulted from the stereotype, that literary creativity is an exclusive male domain, effected in women writers a psychological duplicity that projected a monstrous counter figure to the heroine, typified by Bertha Rochester, the madwoman Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre; such a figure is ‘usually in some sense the author’s double, an image of her own anxiety and rage’.Concerns of gynocritics- 1. to identify distinctively feminine subject matters in literature written by women – The primary issues e.g. the world of domesticity, the special experiences of gestations, giving birth, and nurturing or mother-daughter and woman-woman relations- in which personal and affectional issues, and not external activism is significant. 2. To uncover in literary history a female tradition expressed by a subcommunity of women writers who were aware of, emulated and found support in earlier women writers, and who in turn provide models and emotional support to their own readers and successors.3. To show that there is a distinctive feminine mode of experience or ‘subjectivity’ in thinking feeling, valuing and perceiving oneself and the outer world. 4. To attempt to specify the traits of a ‘woman’s language or distinctively feminine style of speech and writing, in sentence structure, types of relations between the elements of a discourse, and characteristic figures and imagery. Some feminists critically analyse women’s domestic and ‘sentimental’ novels, noted perfunctorily and in derogatory fashion in standard literary histories. These dominated the market for fiction and best sellers in the nineteenth century. Examples seen in Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (1977) on British writers Nina Baym Woman’s fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America 1820-1870 (1978) Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (2 Vols; 1988-89)Often-asserted role of feminist critics is to enlarge and reorder, displace the literary canon- a set of works which by a cumulative consensus have come to be considered ‘major’ as the chief subjects of literary history, criticism, scholarship, and teaching. Feminist studies have brought to forefront many of the sidelined women writers: Anne Finch, George Sand, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, Christina Rossetti, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn Lady, Mary Wortley Montagu, Joanna Baillie, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a number of African-American writers such as Zora Neale Hurston.Some feminists have concentrated on lesbian writers.American and English critics have engaged in empirical and thematic studies of writings by and about women. In France prominent critics have occupied themselves with the ‘theory’ of the role of gender in writing within the poststructuralist frame of reference, Lacan’s reworkings of Freudian psychoanalysis in terms of Saussure’s linguistic theory. English-speaking feminists show demonstrable and specific evidences in which male bias is encoded in our linguistic conventions. E.g. ‘man’, ‘mankind’ for human beings, chairman or spokesman for people of either sex, he and his to refer back to gender neutral nouns like God, human being, child inventor, author, poet.French feminists argue that all western languages are irredeemably male-gendered, male-constituted and male-dominated. According to Lacan Discourse is ‘phallogocentric’- It is centred and organised throughout by implicit recourse to the phallus (symbolic) both as its supposed ‘logos’ or ground, and as its prime signifier and power-source. Phallogocentrism manifests itself in Western discourse not only in its vocabulary and syntax, rigorous rules of logic, proclivity for fixed classifications and oppositions, and its criteria to choose valid evidence and objective knowledge. The basic problem for French theorists is to establish the very possibility of a woman’s language that will not, when a woman writes, automatically be appropriated into this phallogocentric language for such appropriation forces her into complicity with the linguistic features that impose on females a condition of marginality and subservience, or even of linguistic non-entity.To evade this dilemma, Helene Cixous posits the existence of an incipient ‘feminine writing’ with its source in the mother, in that stage of the mother-child relation before the child acquires the male-centred verbal language. Thereafter, this prelinguistic potentiality in the unconscious manifests undermine and subvert the fixed signification, the logic, and the ‘closure’ of our phallocentric language, and open out into a joyous freeplay of meanings. Luce Irigaray posits a ‘woman’s writing’ which evades the male monopoly and the risk of appropriation into the existing system by establishing as its generative principle, in place of monolithic phallus, the diversity, fluidity and multiple possibilities inherent in the structure and erotic functioning of the female sexual organs and in the distinctive nature of female sexual experiences. Julia Kristeva posits a ‘Chora’, or prelinguistic, pre-oedipal, and unsystematized signifying process, centred on the mother, that she labels ‘semiotic’. This process is repressed as we acquire the father-controlled, syntactically ordered, and logical language that she calls ‘symbolic’. The semiotic process can break out in a revolutionary way as in avant-garde poetry, whether written by a women or by men- as a ‘heterogeneous destructive causality’ that disperses the authoritarian ‘subject’ that strikes free of the oppressive order and rationality of our standard discourse which as the product of the ‘law of the Father’ consigns women to a negative and marginal status. In recent years a number of feminists have used poststructuralist positions and techniques to question the founding concepts of feminism itself. They point out the existence of differences and adversarial strands within the supposedly monolithic history of patriarchal discourse, and emphasise the inherent linguistic instability in the basic conceptions of ‘woman’ or ‘the feminine’ as well as the diversities within these supposedly universal and uniform female identities that result from differences in race, class, nationality, and historical situation. The volume of literature both critical and creative as well women’s studies in academia a increasing by the day. The concern with the effects of sexual innovations of the last several decades, the concern with the effects of sexual differences in the writing, interpretation, analysis and assessment of literature seems destined to have the most prominent and enduring effects on literary history, criticism, and academic instruction, as conducted by men as well as women.

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

Saturday, July 29, 2006

I FEP One-act Play Reports

Suggestion regarding written submissions

- Font size 12; Fonts: Times New Roman, Garamond, Book Antiqua; 1½ line space; paper A4 size; matter on one side of the paper.

- Name, register no, class and college, one below the other on the right-hand top corner of the page. No covering page.

- Title of the submission in the centre. Title could be in capital letters, underlined, made bold, italicized. But it should be one of these and not mixture of more than one.

- First paragraph should specify the name of the play, the date of the show, venue and the role of the student. The succeeding paragraphs should narrate the contribution of the student to the practice and performance of the play, what you have learnt from the play, given a chance how would you do it differently/ better, suggestion for the department to imporve upon the One-act Play Festival.

For any clarifications please email me.
Anil Pinto, Dept of Media Studies; http://anilpinto.blogspot.com

What Postmodern Means by Lawrence Cahoone


• Difficult to summaries postmodernism
– a. Disagreement among writers
– b. Postmodernists deny having any doctrine
• Idea of summary antithetical to Pm
• To understand - list
• Imp Ideas in pm works
• Different claims postmodernists make
• Issues dividing pms

Five prominent postmodern themes
Presence or presentation (vs representation or construction)
Origin (vs phenomenon)
Unity (vs plurality)
Transcendence or norms (vs their immanence)
Constitutive otherness

Presence
• =quality of immediate experience
• + the objects thereby immediately represented
• Traditionally presence contrasted with
– a, representation - sphere of linguistic signs
– b. construction – the products of human invention (hence whatever mediated by human factor)
• E.g.: Perception/sensation sense data – passage to reality, more reliable than mental contents subsequently modified, represented and altered by thought or language.
• Pm questions and denies it.
• Pm denies that anything is ‘immediately present’ hence independent of signs, language, interpretation, disagreement etc.
• Also presence presupposes representation
• Derrida- No thing as perception – immediate transparent reception of the given

• Postmodernists deny presence and analysis of representation
• Study The thing
• E.g. using intelligence systems in schools
• Postmodernists analyze use of term ‘intelligence’ by the tests proponents – implying the object or referent of the term never present
• It’s the history and political representations and their political use which is at issue
• We encounter the real world referents through texts, representations, mediation.
• We can never say what is independent of all sayings.


Origin
• = notion of the source of whatever under consideration
• A return to which is often considered the aim of rational enquiry.-
– An attempt to see beyond phenomena to their ultimate foundation.
• Modern philosophies of the self – existentialism, psycho-analysis, phenomenology, Marxism- attempt to discover self road to authenticity.
• Postmodernist argue – it’s not possible to have an access to self completely, it’s never available to us.
• No possibility of returning to, recapturing, representing the origin, source, deeper reality behind phenomena
• Casts doubts and denies existence
• Postmodernism is intentionally superficial. Surface of things, phenomenon don’t require any deeper reference.
• Author is dead - denies origin
• Because no meaning of text can be ‘authoritatively’ revealed through authorial intervention.
• They are not imp, have not privilege over other factors.

Unity
• Unity, single entity is plural
• Everything constituted by other elements
• Constitutive are plural
• Therefore individual plural
• Therefore no analysis is final
• E.g. Texts meaning are never complete/final
• Human self multiplicity of forces or elements.
• Not single unity, hierarchically composed, solid, self-controlled
• We have selves than self

Transcendence of norms X
• Norms- truth, goodness, beauty, rationality- not independent of the processes they serve to govern or judge
• They’re products of and immanent in those processes.
• Social justice product of social relations it serves to govern
• i.e. the idea was created at a certain time and place to serve certain interests and is dependent on certain intellectual and social contexts.
• Rejection of idealism
• Concept of ‘good’ and the act of calling something good not independent of the things we want to call ‘good’
• Therefore postmodernists show processes of thought, writing, negotiation and power which produced those normative claims

Constitutive otherness
• Complex application of the four themes
• Use of constitutive otherness in analyzing any cultural entity
• Cultural entities-human beings, words, meanings, ideas, philosophical systems, social organizations are maintained in their unity through active process of exclusion, opposition, opposition, and hierarchisation
• Other phenomena or units must be represented as foreign or ‘other’ representing hierarchical dualism in which a unit is ‘privileged’ or favoured and the other devalued in some way.
• Postmodernists find – privileged groups must actively produce and maintain their position by representing or picturing themselves- in thought, literature, in law, in art – as not having the properties ascribed to the underprivileged group
• Must represent those groups those groups as lacking the properties of the privileged groups.
• The self may feel compelled to represent itself as excluding sexual or aggressive feelings. They cannot be obliterated. So must be ascribed to chance situations E.g. “ I was not myself that day”
• Margins constitute texts
• Unities are constituted by repressing their dependency on and relations to others.
• Postmodernists analyse the excluded or ‘marginalised’ elements of a system or text.
• Pm in literature turn attention away from well known themes in text toward seldom mentioned, virtually absent, implicitly or explicitly devalued
• Presence constituted by absence.
• Real by appearance
• Ideal by mundane
• This apart from theme also applies to style.
• Postmodernist read metaphors with keen interest
• Process of exclusion false, unstable, immoral
• False= It’s a lie
• Unstable- Must be admitted some day
• Immoral- when becomes social oppression
• Repression in text when read carefully undermines its own message.
• Constitutive otherness shows the dependence of the privileged theme on the marginalized element.
• Social disenfranchisement, marginalization of sexual and racial group is moral and political case of this pattern.
• Some pm wish to remove such repressions, others admit no escape
• Render repressive forces more diverse and fluid- so none becomes monopolistic.

Types of postmodernism
• Three-part classification, overlapping
• Indicative of aims
– Methodological postmodernism
– Positive postmodernism

Methodological postmodernsim
• Rejects the possibility of establishing foundations, thus of ultimate reliability of knowledge.
• Shows that traditional philosophical distinctions b/w real and ideal, objective and subjective, reality and appearance fact and theory are problematic
• It problemetaises
– A. by criticizing the traditional theories of knowledge and linguistic meaning
– b. human interests evident in the construction of these distinctions
• It’s antirealist – claims knowledge is made valid not by its relation to its objects, but by its relation to our pragmatic interests, communal perspectives, needs, rhetoric
• Undercuts the philosophical attempt to justify realism
• Sometime undermines rational inquiry itself by subjecting notions of truth, rationality and meaning to critique.
• M pm is negative – claims or shows inadequacy or problematic nature of other forms of writing and talking and theorizing but offers no explicit alternative.

Positive pm
• Positive reinterpretation of any phenomenon
• It may reconceive the self or God or nature or knowledge or society or art given the critique of unity, origin, presence
• Refers to writing that applies general postmodern themes to particular subject matters in order to offer new vision or understanding.
• Offers alterative

Issues dividing postmodernist
• First
• Recognize whether pm is
– a. merely making a historical claim that modern ideas and methods are being superseded or abandoned in the present age
– b. questioning the validity of modern methods without making any explicit claims about their falsity or suggesting that they be abandoned
– c. claiming the inadequacy of the modern methods and inviting us to abandon them in favour of something else.
• Some postmodernists are wrongly accused of rejecting modern philosophy and society when they only question them.
• E.g. Derrida interpreted as undermining western thought.
• But he says there’s no alternative to ‘logo centrism’ or traditional foundationalism of West: It can’t be abandoned
• Result - tension b/w methodological and positive application of pm
• Most extreme case - Some postmodernists use elements of pm critique to reformulate fundamental conceptions of God and the universe
• This is in principle anathema to post-structuralism and antifounatinalism
• Second
• Pm may seem antithetical to recapturing any past. – not always true.
• While pm philosophers don’t have anything to do with those who wish to recreate past, such a return central to architectural pm.
• Pm architect incorporates ornamentation, banished by modernism.
• But its not premodernism pure, but pluralism.
• Uses premodern element in something that is completely modern
• Synthesizing, juxtaposing and ironically commenting on traditions is not traditional.
• To be traditionalist or premodernist is to be faithful to one tradition, not to all.
• E.g. pm= premodern, monogamy=many sex partners
• Pm and premodern share same enemy

• Third
• Question of political implication of pm.
• Its well-known political manifestation is the attempt to make contemporary culture acknowledge and respond to ‘difference’ or ‘otherness’ under the names of feminism very influential intellectual movement, multiculturalism, a phenomenon in the field of education.
• Both movements overlap with pm.
• Some feminists, multiculturalists are pm some are not
• Most poststructuralist, feminists and multiculturalists are associated with the left. Some others are not
• E.g. Richard Rorty- calls himself ‘postmodernist bourgeois liberal
• Leftists criticize pm opening reactionary forces blocking leftist political reforms.
• Habermas
• Political usefulness of pm is in criticizing any established authority.

Reference

Cahoone, Lawrence. What Postmodernism Means. Modernism to Postmodernism an Anthology

Anil Pinto, Dept of Media Studies; http://anilpinto.blogspot.com