Paper-15 “The New Empire Within Britain.”

Hitesh S. Vaghani

Roll no. - 21

SEM - III

Paper no. – 15

Year – 2010-11

Topic: “The New Empire Within Britain.”

Submitted to Dr.Dilip Barad

Department of English,

Bhavnagar University.

 “The New Empire Within Britain.”

Britain isn’t south Africa. I am reliably   informed  of  this. nor  is it Nazi germany.    I ’ve  got  that  on  the  best   authority    as  well.  you   may   feel    that    these  two  statements    are    not   exactly    the  most   dramatic    of   revelations.   but  it ‘ s   remarkable    now  often   they,    or   similar    statements,   are  used  to     counter   the   arguments  of    anti -  resist      campaigners.     

      That  ralism  is  not  a    side -  issue   in   contemporary   Britain  ;   that  it ‘s  not  a  peripheral   minority    affair.     I believe   that   Britain   is undergoing  a  critical   phase  of    its   post –colonial   period   and  this  crisis   is   not  simply     economic   or   political .  It ‘s  a crisis  of   the   whole  oulture, of the society ‘s    entire  sense   of    itself .    and    racism    is   only     the  most   clearly     visible  part   of   this   crisis ,   the  tip  of  the   kind   of    iceberg    that   sinks  ships .      

The   connection  I   want   to  make    is   this ; that   same   attitudes   are   in     operation    right   here    well  , here   in   what   e. p.  thompson has    described    as    the   last   colony of the British empire . It sometimes   seems that the British   authorities, no longer capable of exporting governments, have chosen instead to import a new empire, a new community of subject peoples of whom they think, and with whom they can deal, in very much the same way as their predecessors thought of and dealt with the fluttered folk and wild’, the ‘new-caught, sullen peoples, halfdeul and half-child, who made up, for Rudyard kipling, the white man’s burden. In short, if we want to understand British racism-and without understanding no improvement is possible-it’s impossible even to begin to grasp the nature of the beast unless we accept its historical roots. Four hundred years of conquest and looting, four centuries of being told that you are superior to the fuzzy-wuzzies and the wogs, leave their stain. This stain has sppped into every part of the culture, the language and daily life; and nothing much has been done to wash it out.

        For proof of the existence of this stain, we can look, for instance, at the huge, undiminished appetite of white Britons for television series, films, plays and books all filled with nostalgia for the great pink age. Or think about the ease with which the English language allows the terms of racial abuse to be coined: wog, frog ,kraut, dago ,spic, yid,coon, nigger, argie. Can there be another language with so wide-ranging a vocabulary of racist denigration ? and, since I’ve mentioned argies, let me auote from margaret thatcher’s  speech at Cheltenham on the third of suly, her famous victory address: ‘we have learned something about ourselves. She said then, a lesson which we desperately need to learn when we started out, there were the waverers and the fainthearts the people who thought we could no longer do the great things which we once did that we could never again be what we were. There were those who would not admitit but in their heart of hearts they too had their secret fears that it was true: that Britain was no longer the nation that had built an empire and ruled a quarter of the world. Well, they were wrong.’

        There are several interesting aspects to this speech. Remember that it was made by a triumphant prime minister at the speak of her popularity; a prime minister who could claim with complete credibility to be speaking for an overwhelming majority of the electorate, and  who, as even her detractors must admit, has a considerable gift for assessing the national mood. Now if such a leader at such a time felt able to invoke the spirit of imperialism, it was because she knew how central that spirit is to the self-image of white Britons of all classes. I say white Britons because it’s clear that mrs thatcher wasn’t addressing the two million or so blacks, who don’t feel quite like that about the empire. So even her use of the world ‘we’ was an act of racial execution like her other well-known speech about the fear of being ‘swamped’ by immigrants. With such leaders, it’s not surprising that the British are slow to learn the real lessons of their past.

           The British empire is not the third tich. But in germany. After the fall of hitler, heroic attempts were made by many people to purify german thought and the german language of the pollution of nazium. Such acts  of cleaning are occasionally necessary in every society , has never been cleaned of the filth of imperialism. It’s still there, breeding lice and vermin, waiting for unscrupulous people to exploit it for their own ends. One of the key concepts of imperialism was that military superiority implied cultural superiority, and this enabled the british to concerned to and repress cultures far older than their own; and it still does. Far the citizens of the new, imported empire, for the colonized Asians and blacks of Britain, the police force represents that colonizing army, those regiments of occupation and control.

                  The facts are that for many years now there has been a sizeable amount of white immigration as well as ‘black, that the annual number of emigrants leaving these shores is now larger than the number of immigrants coming in; and that, of the black Britons, born and bred, speaking in the many voices and accents of Britain, and with no homeland but this one. And still the word ‘immigrant’ means ‘black immigrant’; the myth of ‘swamping’ lingers on; and even British-born blacks and Asians are thought of as people whose real ‘home’ is elsewhere. Immigration is only a problem if you are warried about blacks that is, if your whole approach to the question is one or racial presudice.

          A couple of years ago the british press made a huge stink about a family of African Asians who arrived at heathrow airport and were houred by the very reluetant local authority . this second family barely made the papers it was a family of white rhodesions running away from the prospect of a free zimbabve. One of the more curious aspects of British immigration law is that many Rhodesians, south Africans and other white non-Britons have automatic right of entry and residence here, by virtue of having one British-born grandparent; whereas many British citizens are denied these rights, because they happen to be black.

          The England fair play, tolerance, delency and equality, may be that place never existed anyway, except in fairy-tales. In the streets of the new empire, black women are abused and black children are beaten up on their way home from school. In the rundown housing estates of the empire, black families have their windows broken. They are afraid to go out after dark, and human and animal excrement arrives through their letter-boxes. The policy offer threats instead of protection and the courts offer small hope of redress. Britain is now two entirely different worlds, and the one you inhabit is determined by the color of your  skin. Now in my experience, very few white people, except for those active in fighting racism, are willing to believe the descriptions of contemporary reality offered by blacks. And black people, faced with what professor Michael dummett has called ‘the will not to know a chosen ignorance, not the ignorance of innocence’, grow increasingly suspicious and angry.

          We have, in Britain today, judges like me kinnon   who can say in court that the word ‘nigger’ cannot be considered an epithet of racial abuse because he was nicknamed ‘nigger’ at his public school; or like the great lord denning. Who can publish a book claiming that black people aren’t as fit as whites to serve on suries, because they come from cultures with less. Stringent moral codes. We’ve got a police force that harasses blocks everyday of their lives. There was a policeman who sat in an unmarked car on railton road in brixton last year, shouting abuse at passing block kids and arresting the first youngsters who made the mistake of answering back. There were policeman at a south all demonstration who sat in their vans, writing the letters nf  in the stream of their breath on the windows. The British police have even refused to make  racial discrimination an offence in their code of conduct, in spite of lord scarman’s recommendations. Now it is precisely because the law courts and the police are not doing their jobs that the activities of racist hooligans are on the increase. It’s just not good enough to deplore the existence or neo-fascists in society. They exist because they are permitted to exist.

          At first, we were told, the goal was ‘integration’. Now this word rapidly come to mean ‘assimilation’: a block man could only become integrated when he started behaving like a white one. After ‘integration’ came the concept of ‘racial harmony’. Now once again this sounded virtuous and desirable, but what it meant in practice was that blocks should be persuaded to live peaceably with whites, in spite as all the injustices done to them every day. The call for ‘racial harmony’ was simply an invitation to shut up and smile while nothing  was done about our grievances. And now there’s a new catch word; multiculturalism’. In our schools, this means little more than teaching the kids a few bongo rhythms, how to tie a sari and so forth. In the police training programme, it means telling cadets that black people are so ‘culturally different’ that they can’t help making trouble. Multicaulturalism is the latest token gesture towards britain’s blocks, and it ought to be exposed, like ‘integration and ‘racial harmony’, for the sham it is.

          The worst and most insidious stereotype for last. It is the characterization of black people as a problem. You talk about the race problem, the immigration  problem, all sorts of problems. If you are liberal, you say that black people have problems. If you aren’t, you say they are the problem, but the members of the new colony have only one real problem, and that problem is white people. British racism, of course, is not our problem. It’s yours. We simply suffer from the effects of your problem.

          And until you, the whites, see that the issue is not integration, or harmony, or multiculturalism, or immigration, but simply the business of facing up to and eradicating the prejudices within almost all of you, the citizens of your new, and last, empire will be obliged to struggle against you. You could say that we are required to embark on a new freedom movement  

          And so it’s interesting to remember that when mahatma Gandhi, the father of an earlier freedom movement, came to England and was asked what he thought of English civilization, he replied,’ I think it would be a good idea,’

Paper-14 Communicative Language Teaching

Hitesh S. Vaghani

Roll no. - 21

SEM - III

Paper no. – 14

Year – 2010-11

Topic: Communicative Language Teaching

 

Submitted to Mr. Devarshi Mehta

Department of English,

Bhavnagar University.

Communicative Language Teaching

          In past few years , English Language Programme has gone under several Medifications on account of the researches that have taken place in the language teaching field especially in English language teaching as a second or foreign language. As term, ‘communicate.’ Means to share ideas or to convey messages verbally. It means the communicative approach emphasizes enchacing the communicative capabilities among learners. In English language teaching., it is understood that with the help of C.L.T teachers try to enhance the communicative capabilities, in largest language. The communicative capabilities are better known as communicative competence includes following competences.

v Grammatical competence,

v  Discource competence

v  Strategic

v  Socio linguistic

         At present we find, pupils are by and large not able to use the language that they learn in either written or learn in either written or oral form. In other words, it is their inability to communicate with each other. It is the communicative approach and communicative language teaching which advocates and attaches paramount importance to the communicative aspect of language in English language teaching.

              Language being a means of expression and communication , is learnt to communicate through its use and therefore any language course ought to provide the learner with the skins that enable him to interact with others. Considering ‘this view point, the communicative language teaching may be designed as a teaching language for communication in simple terms. It means:

Ø   In CLT, the whole focus is on communication proficiency rather than on more mastery of language.

Ø It aims at creating the right kind of environment in the class-room. Which brings about in learners an urge to say something with the words and the urge to communicate.

Ø  It puts emphasiz on communicative competence of the learner rather than on structural competence only.

Ø  It favours group work to the maximum possible extent in order to interact the learner with each other and to raise the maximum learner’s involvement in teaching as well as learning process.

Ø   Its one of the aims is to help the learner to acquire communicative competence. For example, ability to use the linguistic system effectively.

Ø  It is the learner oriented approach and not the teacher oriented.

    Some of the feature of CLT are as under:

§  Focus on language as a medium of communication is the main feature of this approach. Recognizes that all communication has a social purpose learner has something to say or find out.

§   In communication, one uses the language with an intention of conveying message and they are always in form of functions, like seeking information, apologizing, expressing likes and dislikes and notions like apologizing for being late asking where the nearest railway station or bus stop is, so in this approach ‘form’ is not primary, but ‘functions’ are primary.

§   In the classroom situations the languages are taught in a vaccum language, for the sake of languages for passing examinations. The language is hardly taught for true communication. The communicative approach enables learners to communicate.

§   In communicative approach learners learn the second or foreign language as one has acquired the first language. Opportunity for learners to use target language in a communicative way for meaning activities. Emphasis is on meaning rather than form.

§   Use of target language as routine medium for classroom instruction and management enables learners to acquire language naturally.

§  Communicative approach is learner centered because all the teaching activities are planned according to learner needs and interects.

§    The learners are taught to use the language and they are taught the language as native. They need to be able to cope or survice in a variety of everyday situations they may encounter in foreign countries where target language is being used.

§   Classroom should provide opportunities for rehearsal of real-life situations and real communication. Emphasis on tenication. Emphasis on techniques like, creative role-plays, simulations, projects etc, produce spontaneity and improvisation not just mere repetition and drills.

§   There is more emphasis on active modes of learning, including pair-work and group work. In this approach learners are active learners.

§   The learners have to develop skills of language; speaking and listening are skills to be exploited for oral communication.

§   Errors are a natural part of learning language. Learners trying their best to use the language creatively and spontaneously are bound to make errors. Constant correction should be noted by teacher. Let them talk and express themselves-form or language becomes secondary.

§   Grammer is taught, but less systematically. It is taught in traditional ways with innovative approaches, so emphasis on teaching grammer is not preseriptive but descriptively.

§   The use of topical items with which the learners are already familiar in their own language,; motivates learners and arouses their interest and leads to more active participation.

§   The authentic material is used instead of age old texts materials must relate to learners own lives, fresh and real revising texts and materials regularly keeps teacher on toes and learners instead.

§   Language need not be labouriously monotonous and ‘medium’ oriented. language can be aruueture. But also spontaneous and incidental. The language is never static; it is dynamic. This approach leads learners to make use of language naturally and according to accepted form and usage.

§   Use of visual stimulti-OHP/hash cards, etc. important to provoke practical communicative language visual resource can be exploited at whatever level one wishes help to motivate and focus learner’s attention.

§   Communicative language teaching is best considered an approach rather than a method. If refers to a diverse set of principles that reflect a communicative view of language and language learning and that can be used to support a wide variety of classroom procedures.

These principles include:

ü Learners learn a language through using it to communicate.

ü  Authentic and meaningful communication should be the goal or class room activities.

ü Fluency is an important dimension or communication.

ü  Communication involves the integration of different language skills.

ü  Learning is a process of creative construction and involves trial and error.

    Communicative language teaching appeared at a time when language teaching in many parts at the world was ready for a paradigm shift. Situational language reaching and audiolingualism were no longer felt to be appropriate methodologies. CLT appealed to those who sought a more humanistic approach to teaching, one in which the interactive processes of communication received priority. The rapid adoption and worldwide dissemination of the communicative approach also resulted from the fact that it quickly assumed the status of orthodoxy in british language teaching circles, receiving the sanetion and support of leading applied linguists , language specialists, and publishers, as well as institutions such as the british council.

 CLT has passed through a number of different phases as its advocates have sought to apply its principles to different dimensions of the teaching process. In 45 first phase, a primary concern was the need to develop a syllabus that was compatible with the nation of communicative competence. This led to proposals for the organization of syllabuses in terms of notions and functions rather than grammatical structures. In the second phase CLT focused on procedure for identifying learners needs and this resulted in proposals to make needs analysis an essential component of communicate methodology. In 45 third phase, CLT focused on the kinds of classroom activities that could be used as the basis of a communicative methodology, such as group work, task-work, and information gap activities.

        Some focus centrally on the input to the learning process. Thus content-based teaching stresses that the content or subject matter of reaching is of primary importance in teaching. not only should the language input be authentic but modes of learning should be authentic to the study of the subject as well. Lexical and corpus-based approaches to reading start with a corpus of discourse relevant to learners’ interests and needs and the goal of methodology is to engage learners directly with this material.

       Some teaching proposal focus more directly on instructional factors. Cooperative learning for example, which shares many of the characteristics of CLT, promotes learning through communication in pairs of small groups. Cooperative organization and activities are central with this approach. Task-based language teaching advocates the importances of specially designed instructional tasks as the basis of learning.

          Whole language belongs to the humanistic tradition, which argues “learner first, learning second”. Learner engagement is a priority. Neurolinguistic programming emerges from a therapeutic tradition in which individual growth and personal change are the focus, whereas multiple intelligences focuses on learner differences and how these can be accommodated in teaching.

             Outcome is another dimension of the process of communication and is central in competency-based language teaching. Outcomes are the starting point in program planning with this approach.

         Communicative language teaching thus continues in its “classic” from, as is seen in the huge range of course books and other teaching resourses based on the principles of CLT. In addition, it has influenced many other language teaching approaches and methods that subscribe to a similar philosophy of language teaching.

Paper-13 Robert Frost as a Poet

Hitesh S. Vaghani

Roll no. - 21

SEM - III

Paper no. – 13

Year – 2010-11

Topic: Robert Frost as a Poet

Submitted to Dr.Dilip Barad

Department of English,

Bhavnagar University.

Robert Frost as a Poet

             Robert frost,”the voice of America” Acoording to graves fit to   be placed beside emerson hawthorne, and theory.he wrote many volumes of poems like ‘a boys will (1913),’north of boston’(1914),’the younentain internal’(1916),’new hempshire’(1923),’west running brook’(1928),’a further range’(1932).a popular and offenquated poet,frost  was honoured frequently during his lifetime,receiving for puiltzer prizes for poetry on the occasion of the inauguration of the U.S.A, he was cayed upon to recite one of his most most patriotic poems the fift outright’and another ofhis lovely lyrics’stopping by words on  a snowy eveninngs’was the stay and solace of Jawaharlal Nehru during the last days of his life.

         Frost has written on almost every subject,but alienation , isolation, barriers and boundries are the major bthemes or his poetry.he portrays the disintegration of values in modern life and the disillysionment of modern man.man of his poems deal with a person testing from loneliness frustration,loss and diseases.frost asserts the value of individual perception against the frost ntarian experience of the contemporary phenomena , barriers regarding self responsibilities can be seen in ‘ stopping by woods on a snowy evening’ in this poem,the poet is charmed by the enchantment of nature and decides to stay for the enjoyment of its beauty. But at the same time,he reminds his duty and responsibility and has to depart fom the spot. Thus,his duty and responsibility become barriers and boundaries in the way of nature..

            There are barriers which separate man from man; such barriers come in the way of social communication and lock of communication leads to social alignation and emotional isolation in the home barial ‘there is a greous lack of communication between the husband and the wife, and the mother’s grief dipends into insanity. The shadow of their dead child is the barriers which divide them, and alienates them for each other. In this poem, mother replies her husband , when husband asks her ‘what is it you see from up there always’?

                               “just that I see

                                 You don’t tea

                                Me what is this”

           Social restriction can also be seen in this poem as wide can’t be leave her husband alone in the home by the dear of society. ‘The death of the hired mans ‘presents a terrifying picture of the loneliness of a socially alienated old servant, silas, who must work even in his old age to support himself. his pride keeps him away from his own brother, and moves on, alone helpless like a striken deer. The theme of capitalism or class –conflict can be found in his poem ‘design’ in which spider prays moath by using its cob. In the same way upper-class people exploit the poor and on the other side, the poor people can’t escape from cobweb of society and they have to be exploited with them. another theme ‘complexity of modern era’ is seen in ‘fire and ice’. These two words are symbolished as passion and hatred which would become a cause for the destruction of this word.

           Realism is another aspect of frost poetry. According to frost there are two types of realism; there is one who offers good deal of dirt with his potato to show that it is a real world and there is a one who is satisfied with the potato crushed in.  I am inclined  to be  the second one. To me, the thing that art does for life is to clean it, strike it to form the problems which human beings  are facing in modern era are family crisis ,global warning, capitalism, possessiveness a human mentality, tlight of fency, are seen in his poems. In his poem, ‘birches’, he mentiones the condition of human being, and wishes to escape from reality. He says,

                                         “and life is too much

                                           Like a pathless wood,

                                           Where your face burns

                                            and tickles with the

                                            cola webs,

                                            broken across it, and

                                            one eye is weeping,

                                            I’d like to get away

                                           From earth a while.”

 Robert frost is highly regarded for his realistic depiction of rural life and his command of American colloquial, speech. The background to his poetry is provided by country-scenes and sights. He writes of riral people and rural occupations and pleasures-apple-picking, gum gathering. Hay-collecting, birth – swinging. in his poetry, we do not find the city scenery and city people to whom we are used in modern poetry. as we find in birches’; the poet, imagines,

                     “as he went out and in

                     To fetch the cows-

                     Some boys too far from

                    Town to learn baseball,

                    Whose only play was that

                   He found himself,

                  Summer or winter ,and

                  Could play alone.”

               Thus, pastoral elements can be seen in his poems. Frost is compared with wordsworth so far as nature is concerned frost was not only glorified nature but also revealed the destructive side of nature. He reminds us of P.B, Shelley, who said in ‘ode to west wind’,’nature is both: preserver and destroyer.’

              The use of the dramatic monologue another striking feature of his poems dramatic monologue reveals the struggle, tacking place. In the inner mind of the character. We find dramatic monologue in ‘home burial’ in which husband expresses his helplessness in his words,

                         “the nearest friends can

                        Go with anyone to death,

                       Comes so far short they might as well not

                   Fry to go at all

                 No, from the time when

                 One is sick to death.”

          These above lines show the condition of the modern man. we can also find dramatic monologue in ‘west running book’ and death of a hired man.’

           The first thing which strikes us is the extreme simplicity of his poetry. The writes of the simplest subjects, and he says what he has to say in the most lacid and simple manner but this simplicity of frost is deceptive. As a matter of fact, frost is both for the masses and the classes. A careful; reading of his poems reveals that he is extraordinarily subtle. compare , and intricate they have layers within layers of meaning. Frost makes extensive use of symbols to convey profound truth, and in this respect, he is one with such modern poets as eliot, yeats, pound, auden. ilis complexity is seen in his habit of bringing together the opposite of life in the manner of the metaphysical poets, like ‘fire and ice.’

   ‘home burial’, ‘death of a hired man’, ’birches’, ‘west running book’ thus almost all the title of his poems are itself symbolised. Thus use of iuxtaposition is one his peculiar qualities.

               Frost uses a different kind of languages appropriate for each of these thus. Kinds of lyrics. in the pure, personal lyric frost’s languages has a rare smoothness, force and sublimity. The communication is direct without any interruption and breaks in the form of asides, pauses. And parentheses on the other hand, in the longer dramatic lyrics the medium is the conversational languid and so diction is replace with the characteristics of the spoken tongue. The most important things in the diction of poems like ‘home burial’ are the breaks, the dashes, the asides, and the exclamation his poems also have a dramatic quality. He brings poetry in harmony with the spoken words and thus satisfies the words worthian theory of diction.

              There is no doubt that frost takes a rather bleak and gloomy view of man’s earthy. Existence, but he can not be concerned as a pessimist merely for this reason. In fact, he is a realist and an ameliorist. He does not shut his eyes. To the evil, sorrow and suffering which best man’s life on this earthl, his approach is never cynical and nihilistic’, he does never suggest that the life is not worth living or that it would have been better not to have been born at all. He loves the world, as it is found in ‘birches’ express his love nicely. He wants to escape from reality but very next moment, he decides to return to earth,

                                   “Earth is the right place

                                    For love

                                    I do not know where

                                    It is likely to go

                                    Better.”

       The life of human beings is full of thorns but it can be made bearable by doing one’s duty, sincerely and devotedly.

Paper-12 The Vocation Of the Researcher

Hitesh S. Vaghani

Roll no. - 21

SEM - III

Paper no. – 12

Year – 2010-11

Topic: The Vocation Of the Researcher

Submitted to Dr.Dilip Barad

Department of English,

Bhavnagar University.

      The Vocation Of the Researcher

The critic’s business is primary with the literary work itself with its structure, style and content of ideas. Scholars, on the other hand, are more concerned with the facts attending its genesis and subsequent history. While facts have a certain charm in themselves, as every history-minded person knows, the scholar values them in direct proportion to the help they afford- at once or in prospect- in illuminating specific pieces of literature and the interaction of many works that constitutes what is called literary history. They scholar’s eye is rather like the poet’s–not, to be sure, “in a fine frenzy rolling.”

          Here is a hamlet, here is a lyric by Shelley, here is a great expectation. Each is intelligible in itself, and any attentive reader can derive immense pleasure from it. But almost every literary work is attended by a host of outside circumstances that, once we expose and explore them, suffer it with additional meaning.

          Sainte-beeves’ critical axiomatic arbre, tel fruit “like the tree, like the fruit.” Is a bland oversimplification, to be sure, but the fact remains that behind the book is a man or woman whose character and experience cannot be overlooked in many effort to establish what the book really says. The quality of the imagination, the genetic and psychological factors that shaped a writer’s personality and determined the atmosphere of his or her inner being, the experiences, large and small. That fed the store from which such an artist in words drew the substance of art: all these must be sought, examined, and weighed if we are to comprehend the meaning of a text.

          Private influences are involved, authors. Whether conformists or rebels, are the products of time and place, their mental set fatefully determined by the social and cultural environment. To understand a book, we must also understand the manifold socially derived attitudes-the morality, the myths, the assumptions, the biases- that it reflects or embraces. T.S.Eliot in his seminal essay on “tradition and individual talent”, has his complete meaning alone. His significance his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.

          Literary research, then, is devoted for one thing, to the enlightenment of criticism- which may or may not take advantage of the proffered information. It seeks to illuminate the work of art as it really is and –the difference may be considerable as it was to its first audience; equally, it tries to see the writer as he really was, his cultural heritage and the people for whom he wrote as they really were. But while this is unquestionably its major purpose, it has at least one other important function, literary history constitutes one of the strands of which the history of civilization itself is woven. Like its sister didciplines of musicology and art history. It finds its material in the vast array of records we have inherited of the imaginative side of human experience- in its case, the representation in language of that experience. Literature preserves for us, for example, the poignancies  of the medieval aspiration toward heaven though held down by mortal chains: the excitement of the renaissance awareness of the splendors that environ western mankind in the here and now; the cool and candid re-estimate of the world and the human self that the eighteenth century made under the auspices of revolutionary science and skeptical philosophy; and the spiritual chiaroscuro of wasteland and earthly paradise, the bewildering series of shocks and recoveries, to which modern society has been subjected in the past two centuries. Literature, then is an eloquent artistic document, infinitely varied, of mankind’s journey: the autobiography of the race’s soul.

          Finally, there are the unmeasurable but intensely real personal satisfaction that literary research affords men and women of a certain temperament  the sheer joy of finding out things that have previously been unknown and thus of increasing, if but by a few grains, the aggregate of human knowledge.

          As a consequence of this recent dramatic expansion of the scope of literary interest, it is certain that, given a fair degree of imagination, originality of approach, solidity of learning, and the wish and the will to see works of literary art and their creators from new perspectives, everyone called to the profession will discover amply rewarding projects.

          America during the past half century or so, most literary research has been done by academic people, and publishing the results of research has provided the traditional boost up the professional ladder. Unfortunately, the notorious cliché “publish or perish” still describes the attitude or many college and university administrations charged with deciding the fate of young untenured faculty members. The validity of such a criterion for promotion and tenure remains, as it has been for many years, a hotly debated issue. A three-word siogan, of course, grotesquely oversimplifies what is, in truth, a complicated academic situation and an equally complicated relationship between published scholarship and the purposes of higher education. Any external pressure to write scholarly books and articles is pernicious not only because. It may well divert a career from its natural course, thus causing a good deal of personal unhappiness, but because scholarship performed under duress is seldom very good scholarship. Indeed, it is to the “publish or perish” mentality that we can attribute the present bloated condition of the annual bibliographies and the appearance, in the proliferating journals, of a lamentable amount of incompetent, pretentious, or trivial writing that should have been intercepted somewhere between the typewriter or personal computer and the press. Furthermore, and perhaps worst of all, this mentality falsifies the whole rationale of scholarship, placing it on a crass mercenary basis whereas, it if deserves to be supported in a humanistic society. Its practice must be motivated by altruism.

          … I am not against research. I practice it. I honor it, I love it. But a taste for literary research is something special. It is not the same thing as delight in reading, or delight in introducing others to the pleasures of reading or the pleasures of writing. We do well to encourage literary research. We do in to impose it as a requirement for promotion and status in the teaching profession. Literary research is a privilege, deserving of no reward except the writer’s joy in his article, his book, his public utterance of his precious thought.

          Similar sentiments were expressed a decade later by William d. Schaefer, executive director of the modern language association of America, “during that critical period of the 1960’s our record was flawless in that, as a profession, we managed to do everything wrong and nothing right… the stupidest thing we did and this was not forgivable because its implications were and are so ugly, was to perpetuate a rewards system based on publication… what should have been a natural and healthy act, sharing ideas with colleagues through print, became unnatural, sick what should have remained student papers or notes for undergraduate lectures became ‘articles’ in which, in emulation of the sciences, we more often that not pretended to ‘solve’ literature rather than to interpret, understand, and appreciate it.’

          A few business and professional men do literary research in their spare time is the best possible evidence of the pleasure scholarship affords people who have nothing else to gain from it. They are scholars for the same reason that T.S.Eliot, a publisher Wallace stevens, an insurance executive, and William carlos Williams, a pediatrician, were poets. What are the chief qualities of mind and temperament that go to make up a successful and happy scholar?

          Journalism, more specifically the work of the investigative reporter; also calls for resourcefulness-knowing were to go for one’s information and how to obtain it, the ability to recognize and follow up leads, and tenacity in pursuit of the facts. Both professions, moreover, require organizational skill, the ability to put facts together in a pattern that is clear and, if controversy is involved persuasive.

          Ideal researchers must love literature for its own sake, that is to say, as an art. They must be insatiable readers, and the earlier they have acquired that passion, the better. The kind of work involved in meaningful literary study requires the peculiar impetus and intellectual sympathies that only devotion to an art, and a desire to share it with others, can provide. In her presidential address at the modern language association’s annual convention in 1980, Helen vendler took her text from the end of worldsworth’s prelude: “what we have have loved, /others will love, and we will teach them how.” That same dedication infuses one’s activity as a professional scholar. How to value concision and clarity over obscurity and evasiveness; how to appreciate a new critical vocabulary when it brings energy or insight into our world.

          In the second place, researchers must have a vivid sense of history: the ability to cast themselves back into another age. They must be able to adjust their intellectual sights and imaginative responds to the systems of thought and the social and cultural atmosphere that prevailed in fourteenth-century England or early twentieth century America. Byrne was spinning out his oriental romances. Otherwise, they cannot comprehend the current attitudes or artistic assumptions that guided an author as he or she set pen to paper. At the same time, scholars must retain their footing in the twentieth century for the sake of the indispensable perspective the historian needs.

          Unlike the natural sciences, however literary research tolerates to a degree the subjective impression as is inevitable in discipline that deals with the human consciousness and the art it produces. But as assemblers and assayers of historical facts, literary scholars need to be as rigorous in their method as scientists. And indeed, a background in science is almost as good preparation for literary research as is one in law of newspaper work, because some of the same qualities are required; intellectuacuriosity, shrewdness, precision, imagination. The lively inventiveness that constantly suggests new hypotheses, new strategies, new sources of information, and when all the data are in, makes possible their accurate interpretation and evaluation.

          Scholarship involves a great amount of detail work, in which no margin of error is allowed and over which the analytic intellect must constantly preside. It is no occupation for the impatient or the careless; nor is it one for the easily fatigued. Scholars must not only be capable of hard, often totally fruitless work-they must actually relish it. “the test of a vocation,” the aphorist essayist Logan Pearsall smith once wrote,” is the love of the drudgery it involve.” The researcher pays. For every exultant discovery with a hundred hours of monotonous, eye-searing labor. Even despite technological advances in information storage and retrieval, there are numerous bibliographies to be searched, item by item if the indexing is undependable; calendars of manuscripts, took auction records, lists of dissertations. Long files of periodicals to be plowed through; box-full’s of fragile and half-illegible holograph letters to be examined in quest of a single clue; volumes upon volumes of dull reminiscences to be scanned for the appearance of a single name.

           Without it the scholar is “lost as words worth put it, “in a gloom of uninspired research.” Human limitations being what they are, the profession has always had its share of members resembling Scott’s dr.dryasdust and George Eliot’s Mr. Casaubon.

          The words research and scholarship are used interchangeably as is the common practice; much that has been said does far implies a distinction between the two that certainly exists, it not in the letter of present usage, at least in the spirit. It is pithily embodied in a proverb that h.l.mencken attitudes to the lapanese: “ learning without wisdom is a load of books on an ass’s back.” One can be a researcher, full of knowledge, without also being a scholar research is the means scholarship the end; research is an occupation, scholarship is a habit of mind and a way of  life. Scholars are more than researchers, for while they may be gifted in the discovery and assessment of facts, they are besides, persons of broad and luminous learning.

          The observations made on this distinction are those of john Livingston lowers, spoken in 1933 but really dateless: humane scholarship… moves and must move within two worlds at once- the world of scientific method and the world, in whatever degree, of creative art. The postulates of the two are radically different. Research, which is the primary instrument of science, is felt to be the easier and it is also the more alluring. I too have heard the sirens sing, and I know where of I speak, and so we tend to become enamored of the methods, and at times to forget the end; to allow, in a word, the destination of the means to distract us from the very object for which they are employed. And that end is. In the broadest sense of the word, interpretation. The interpretation. In the light of all that our researches can reveal, of the literature which is our professional concern.”