Paper-10 Cultural studies in practice: Hamlet

Hitesh S. Vaghani

Roll no. - 21

SEM - II

Paper no. – 10

Year – 2010-11

Topic: Cultural studies in practice: Hamlet

Submitted to Dr.Dilip Barad

Department of English,

Bhavnagar University.

         Let us now approach Shakespeare’s Hamlet with a view to seeing power in its cultural context.

      Shortly after the play within the play, Claudius is talking privately with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet’s fellow students from students from Wittenberg. In response to Claudius’s plan to send Hamlet that – if read out of context is both an excellent set of metaphors and a summation of the Elizabethan concept of the role and power of kingship.

                  Taken alone, the passage is a thoughtful and imagistic ally successful passage, worthy of a wise and accomplished statesman.

           But how many readers and viewers of the play would rank this passage among the best-known lines of the play with Hamlet’s soliloquies, for instance, or with the king’s effort to pray, or even with the aphorisms addressed by Polonius to his son Laetes? We venture to say that the passage, intrinsically good if one looks at it alone, is simply not well known.

      Why?

   Attention to the contact and to the speaker gives the answer. Guildenstern had just agreed that he and Rosencrantz would do the king’s bidding. The agreement is only a reaffirmation of what they had told the king when he first received them at court. Both speeches are wholly in character, for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are among the jellyfish of Shakespeare’s characters. Easy it is to forget which of the two speaks which lines indeed easy it is to forget most of their lines altogether. The two are distinctly plot-driven empty of personality, sycophantic in a sniveling way, eager to curry favor with power even if it means spying on their erstwhile friend. Weakly they admit, without Mack skill at denial, that they “were sent for” . Even less successfully they try to plan on Hamlet’s metaphorical “pipe”, to know his “stops”, when they are forced to admit that they could not even handle the literal musical instrument that Hamlet shows instrument that Hamlet shows them. Still later these nonentities meet their destined “non beingness”, as it were, when Hamlet, who can play the pipe so much more efficiently, substitutes their names in the death warrant intended for him.

         If ever we wished to study two character s that are marginalized, and then let us look upon Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

        The meanings of their names hardly match what seems to be the essence of their characters. Murray j. Levith, for example, has written that “Guildenstern and Rosencrantz are from the Datch-German: literally “garland of roses” and “golden star”. Although of religious origin, both names together sound singsong and odd to English ears. Their jangling gives them a lightness, and blurs the individuality of the characters they label”.

        Lightness to be sure. Harley Granville- Barker once wrote in an offhand way of the reaction these two roles call up for actors commenting on solanio and salarino from The Merchant of Venice, he noted that their roles are “Cursed by actors as the two worse bores in the whole Shakespearean canon; not excepting, even those other twin brethren in nonentity, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. 

            Harold Jenkins reports as historical person bearing these names: “These splendidly resounding names, by contrast with the unlocalized classical ones, are evidently chosen as particularly Danish both were common among the most influential Danish familiar, and they are often found together”. He cites various appearances of the names among Danish nobles, and even notes the appearances of the names as Wittenberg students around 1590.

           The personalities and general vacuity of Shakespeare’s two incompetents. So let us look elsewhere for what these two characters tell us. Let us review what they do, and what is done to them. Simply, they have been students at Wittenberg.

         They return to Denmark, apparently at the direct request of Claudius. They try try to pry from hamlet some of his inner thoughts, especially of ambition and frustration about the crown. Hamlet foils them. They crumble before his own questioning. As toned above, Claudius later sends them on an embassy with Hamlet, carrying a letter to the king of England that would have Hamlet summarily executed. Though they may not have known the contents of that grand commission. Hamlet’s suspicion of them is enough for him to contemplate their future and to “trust them is enough for him to contemplate their future and to “trust them as adders fanged”

                     Clearly Hamlet makes reference in the lines just noted to the “mighty opposites” represented by himself and Claudius clearly too the ones of “baser nature” who “made love to this employment” do not matter much in this struggle between powerful antagonists. They are powns for Claudius first, for Hamlet second. It is almost as if Hamlet had tried before the sea voyage to warn them of their insignificant state, he calls Rosencrantz a sponge, provoking.

                      So they are pawns, or sponge, or monkey food: the massage of power keeps coming through. Thus, they do not merit a pang of conscience. True there may be some room for believing that at first they intended only good for their erstwhile school fellow. But their fate, however, is to displease mightily the prince, who will undermine them and “hoist with own petard.”

           Claudius was aware of power, clearly, when he observed of Hamlet’s apparent madness that “Madness in great ones must not unwatched go’ with equal truth Rosencrantz and Guildenstern might have observed that power in great ones also must not unwatched go.

             Whether they “are” at all may be the ultimate question of this modern play. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Are dead, Stoppard has given the contemporary audience a play that examines existential question in the context of a whole world that may have no meaning at all. Although is it not our intention to examine that play in great detail, suffice it to note that the essence of marginalization is here in this view, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are archetypal human beings, caught up on a ship- spaceship. Earth for the twentieth or the twenty first century that leads now here, except to death, a death for persons who are a heady dead. If these two characters were marginalized in Hamlet, they are even more so in stop-part’s handing.

                 Whether in Shakespeare’s version or stopper’s, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are no more than what Rosencrantz called a “small annexment”, a “petty consequences”, mere nothings for the “ massy wheel” of kings.

            Andrew Marvell’s “To His coy Mistress” tell the reader a good deal about the speaker of the poem, much of which is already clear from earlier comments in this volume, using traditional approaches. We know that the speaker is knowledgeable about poems and conventions of classic Greek and Roman literature, about other convetionsof medieval Europe, and about Biblical passages.

               Indeed if one accepts the close reading of Jules Brody, the speaker shows possible awareness of the Provencal amour de loan, neo-patriarchal “complaints”, Aquinas’s concept of the triple-leveled soul, Biblical echoes a “platonicochristian corporeal economy” and the convention of the blazon. The first stanza, says Brody, shows ‘Its insistent, exaggerated literariness.”

               The speaker know all of these things well enough to parody or at least to echo them, for in making his proposition to the coy lady, he hardly expected to be taken seriously in his detailing. He knows that he is echoing the conventions only in order to satirize them and to make light of the real proposal at hand. He knows that she knows, for she comes from the same cultural milieu that he does.

            In other words, the speaker like Marvell is a highly educated person, one who is well read, one whose natural flow of associated images moves lightly over details and allusions that reflect who he is,  and he expects his hearer or reader to respond in a kind of harmonic vibration. He thinks in terms of precious stones, of exotic and distant place, of a mille where eating, drinking, and making merry seem to be an achievable way of life.

             Beyond what we know of the speaker from his own words, we are justified in speculating that his coy lady is like the implied reader, equally well educated, and there knowledgeable of the conventions he uses in parody. He seems to assume that she understands the periodic nature of his comments, for by taking her in on the jests he appeals to her intellect, thus trying to throw her off guard against his very physical requests. After all, if the two of them can be on the same plane in their thoughts and allusions, their smiles and jests, then perhaps they can shortly be together on a different and literal plane literally bedded.

            Thus might appear to be the culture and the era of the speaker, his lady – and his implied reader.

         But what does he not show? As selects these rich and multifarious allusions, what does he ignore from his cultural? He clearly does not think of poverty, the demographics and socio-economic details of which would show how fortunate his circumstances are. For example, it has been estimated that during this era at least one quarter of the European population was below the poverty line. Nor does the speaker think of disease as a daily reality that he might face. To be sure, in the second and especially in the third stanza he callused to future death and dissolution.

But wealth and leisure and sexual activity are his currency, his coin for present bliss. Worms and morble vaults and ashes are not present, hence not yet real.

             Now consider historical reality, a dimension that the poem ignores. Consider disease- real and present disease what has been called the “chronic morbidity” of the population. Although the speaker thrusts disease and death into the future, we know that syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases were just as real a phenomenon in Marvell’s day as in our era. What was the reality that the speaker chooses not to think about, as he pushes off death and the “vault” to some distant time?

               Similarly, one might turn to a different disease that was in some ways even more ominous, more wrenching, in its grasp of the mind and body of the general population. Move ahead a few years, beyond the probable time of composition of the poem in the early 1650s. Move to 1664-65. That was when the London populace was faced with an old horror, one that had, ravaged Europe as early as A.D.542. It did it again in its most thoroughgoing way in the middle of the fourteenth century, killing millions, perhaps 25 million in Europe alone. It was ready to strike again. It was, of course, a recurrence of the Black Death, in the Great Plague of London. From July to October, it killed some 68,000persons, and a total of 75,000 in the course of the epidemic. Had we world enough and time, we could present the details of the plague here, its physical manifestations, its rapid spread, the quickness of death: but the gruesome horrors are available elsewhere. For example, the curious can get a sense of the lived experience by reading Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722), an imaginative creation of what it was like.

         So disease was real in the middle of the seventeenth century. There needed no ghost to come from the world of the dead to tell Marvell’s speaker about the real world. Perhaps the speaker and his lady knew it after all. Maybe too well. Maybe that is why that real world is so thoroughly absent from the poem.



Paper-9 Structure of the novel Oliver Twist

Hitesh S. Vaghani

Roll no. - 21

SEM - II

Paper no. – 9

Year – 2010-11

Topic: Structure of the novel Oliver Twist

Submitted to Ruchira Madam

Department of English,

Bhavnagar University.

           Oliver Twist is a typical Dickens novel, fashioned around a core of tangled intrigue that brings together a large number of people. These characters are of varied origins and diverse backgrounds. On the surface, it would seem unlikely that their paths should ever cross, but they are all inexorably drawn into the same web of circumstances. Dickens suggests that the lives of people of all stations may become intertwined. No one, he says, is safe from being influenced by the actions of others — possibly even completes strangers. The resulting complications and their unraveling contribute a large measure of mystery and suspense. Writers and critics sometimes use the term denouement in connection with the resolution of a story. The French word simply means an unknotting or an unscrambling of a jumble of twine. See how easily that relates to the complex interactions of a Dickens story.

                  The characteristic distinguishing ingredients of plot are conflict and resolution. In Oliver Twist, there are dual conflicts: the one between Monks and Oliver, the other between Fagin and Sikes. Through his conspiracy with Monks, Fagin becomes involved in both conflicts. He also becomes the agent whose decisions trigger the two lines of inevitable action, which subsequently converge.

                    The crisis in Oliver's conflicts involves no significant desire on his part. Fagin makes one critical decision when he maneuvers Oliver into the Chertsey fiasco. The unsuccessful burglary is the climax in the boy's misadventures. The grim disaster leaves him utterly helpless, but it is a turning point and his fortunes steadily improve from there. The resolution of his difficulties is achieved by Brownlow's triumph over Monks.

                       In the smoldering rivalry between Sikes and Fagin, the crisis is reached when Fagin actually plans to have Sikes murdered. Fagin's first step to eliminate Sikes involves having Nancy spied upon. This leads directly to the climax of the girl's murder. With that bloody deed, the entire company of thieves is drawn into a whirlpool of events, which ultimately brings them all to ruin. The denouement discussed earlier — the unknotting of story complications — comes with Sikes literally being hanged in his own noose, at the end of the day when the gang has been demolished.

                 Dickens's illustrations of the complications and their unraveling are accomplished by means of a complex mosaic of back-illumination. This technique offers several distinct advantages. It makes it easier to raise suspense to a high pitch and keep reader interest at a lively level. In order to draw the numerous persons into the current of events, Dickens is forced to make liberal use of accident and coincidence. By using the tricks and techniques of the dramatist that he was, Dickens is able to obscure his coincidences and accidents to the point where the reader scarcely notices. Other improbabilities are also made to seem real through Dickens's manipulation. In Chapter 49, for example, Brownlow undermines Monks's resistance with the startling words "the only proofs of the boy's identity lie at the bottom of the river, and the old hag that received them from the mother is rotting in her coffin." These are the exact words that Nancy claimed to have overheard from Monks while she was engaged in her risky game of eavesdropping on Monks’ secret meeting with Fagin. Then Rose precisely remembered this statement after her tempestuous meeting with Nancy in Chapter 40 and passed it on to Brownlow, who uses it to demoralize Monks with the very words that he spoke to Fagin in supposed secret. This flawless transmission would verge on the absurd if it were methodically reported in normal time-sequence. But as it is, the implausibility is lost sight of in the intricate patterns of disclosure.

                      The novel exhibits many characteristics of melodrama. The quality of pathos (sentimentality) is freely injected, most gratuitously in the case of Oliver's friend, "little Dick." The portrait of Oliver's mother and Monk’s scar are signs used as recognition devices. Other examples of standard melodramatic apparatus include the doings of the evil brother, a destroyed will, assumed names, and the discovery of unknown relatives.

                The romantic subplot between Rose and Harry uses elements of melodrama. In the contest between the evil and good forces of the book, Rose stands out in a dazzling display that would today be called "goody-goody." Hurry’s noble abandonment of fame and fortune for the sake of true love is a lofty tribute to virtuous sentiment — it could happen in real life, but it often does not. Although the romance is hardly a vital element of the plot, it does follow established literary tradition and provides a center of interest for bringing the book to a conclusion.

                    Oliver Twist is a novel teeming with many closely interrelated ideas. There is preoccupation with the miseries of poverty and the spread of its degrading effects through society. With poverty comes hunger, another theme that is raised throughout the book, along with Dickens's notion that a misguided approach to the issues of poverty and homelessness brings many evils in its wake.

                    One of the worse consequences of poverty and being deprived of life's essentials is crime, with all of its corrosive effects on human nature. Dickens gives a great deal of attention to the painful alienation from society suffered by the criminal, who may come to feel completely isolated as the fragile foundations of his own hostile world snap. Crime is bad enough in itself, Dickens seems to be saying. When crime is the result of poverty, it completely dehumanizes society.

                       On the positive side, Dickens places heavy value on the elevating influence of a wholesome environment. He emphasizes the power of benevolence to overcome depravity. And goodness — like criminal intent — may expect to earn its own suitable reward. Sound familiar? The Dickensian theme of virtue being its own reward has its roots in the novels and poems of chivalry and redemption, where the good prosper and the "wicked" are sent packing.

                   A novel may have many levels of symbolism. Setting and characters may convey symbolic meaning aside from their plot functions. Some trait or gesture of a person may symbolize an aspect of his character, as Bumble's fondness for his three-cornered hat serves to illuminate his devotion to a tradition of recognition, status, and power.

                  A purely symbolic character is one who has no plot function at all. The chimney sweep, Garfield, may be looked upon in this light. He contributes nothing to the development of the plot but stands forth as a significant embodiment of unprovoked cruelty. Ordinarily, symbolic statement gives expression to an abstraction, something less obvious and, perhaps, even hidden. In spite of his conspicuous role in the plot, Brownlow exemplifies at all times the virtue of benevolence.

                      The novel is shot through with another symbol, obesity, which calls attention to hunger and the poverty that produces it by calling attention to their absence. It is interesting to observe the large number of characters who are overweight. Regardless of economics, those who may be considered prosperous enough to be reasonably well-fed pose a symbolic contrast to poverty and undernourishment. For example, notice that the parish board is made up of "eight or ten fat gentlemen"; the workhouse master is a "fat, healthy man"; Bumble is a "portly person"; Giles is fat and Brittles "by no means of a slim figure"; Mr. Losberne is "a fat gentleman"; one of the Bow Street runners is "a portly man." In many ways, obesity was as much a sign of social status as clothing.

                Setting is heavily charged with symbolism in Oliver Twist. The physical evidences of neglect and decay have their counterparts in society and in the hearts of men and women. The dark deeds and dark passions are concretely characterized by dim rooms, smoke, fog, and pitch-black nights. The governing mood of terror and merciless brutality may be identified with the frequent rain and uncommonly cold weather.

                  Dickens's style is marked by a kind of literary obesity that is displeasing to some modern tastes. But in this connection — as in all others — we need to look at Dickens from the standpoint of his contemporaries. This means judging his art in one instance as it was viewed by the audience he addressed, whose tastes and expectations were vastly different from our own. A tribute to the greatness of his work is that it can still be read with pleasure today in spite of some of its excesses.

                   In many ways, the pace of life was more unhurried and deliberate in the early-nineteenth century than it is now, so readers would have the time to savor Dickens's rich use of language. In a period when people were thrown much on their own resources for diversion, without the intrusions of movies, radio, or television, they could enjoy a display of literary virtuosity for its own sake. The practice of reading aloud helped to bring out the novelist's artistry. When Dickens read from his books, his audiences were entranced, so he must, at least unconsciously, have written with some thought for oral effect.

                 The conditions of publication undoubtedly were instrumental in shaping the writer's technique. When he was faced with the challenge of holding his readers for over a year, he had to make his scenes unforgettable and his characters memorable. Only a vivid recollection could sustain interest for a month between chapters. Also, there was a need to cram each issue with abundant action to satisfy those who would re-read it while waiting impatiently for the next installment. What may seem excessively rich fare to those who can read the novel straight through without breaking may have only whetted the appetites of the original readers. The immediate popularity of Dickens's works bears witness to the soundness of his literary judgment.

Paper-08 “Satire M H Abrams in Glossary of Literary Terms’’

Hitesh S. Vaghani

Roll no. - 21

SEM - II

Paper no. – 08

Year – 2010-11

Topic: “Satire M H Abrams in Glossary of Literary Terms’’

Submitted to Dr. Dilip Barad

Department of English,

Bhavnagar University.

Satire can be described as the literary art of diminishing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation. It differs from the comic in that comedy evokes laughter mainly as an end in itself, while satire derides; that is, it uses

Laughter as a weapon, and against a butt that exists outside the work itself. That butt may be an individual (in "personal satire"), or a type of person, a class, an institution, a nation, or even (as in the Earl of Rochester's "A Satyr against Mankind," 1675, and much of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, 1726, especially Book IV) the entire human race. The distinction between the comic and the satiric, however, is sharp only at its extremes. Shakespeare's Falstaff is a comic creation, presented primarily for our enjoyment; the puritanicalMalvolio in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night is for the most part comic but has aspects

of satire directed against the type of the fatuous and hypocritical Puritan; Ben Jonson's Volpone (1607) clearly satirizes the type of person whose cleverness—or stupidity—is put at the service of his cupidity; and John Dryden's satire.

                        MacFlecknoe (1682), while representing a permanent type of the pretentious poetaster,

Satirized specifically the living author Thomas Shadwell.

Satire has usually been justified by those who practice it as a corrective of human voice and folly; Alexander Pope, for example, remarked that "those who are ashamed of nothing else are so of being ridiculous." Its frequent claim (not always borne out in the practice) has been to ridicule the failing Rather than the individual, and to limit its ridicule to corrigible faults, excluding those for which a person is not responsible. As Swift said, speaking of himself in his ironic "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift" (1739):

Yet malice never was his aim;

He lashed the vice, but spared the name. . .

His satire points at no defect,

But what all mortals may correct....

He spared a hump, or crooked nose,

Whose owners set not up for beaux?

                  

                     Satire occurs as an incidental element within many works whose overall mode is not satiric—in a certain character or situation, or in an interpolated passage of ironic commentary on some aspect of the human condition or of contemporary society. But for some literary writings, verse or prose, the attempt to diminish a subject by ridicule is the primary organizing principle, and these works constitute the formal genre labeled "satires." In discussing such writings the following distinctions are useful.

(1) Critics make a broad division between formal (or "direct") satire and indirect satire. In formal satire the satiric persona speaks out in the first person. This "I" may address either the reader (as in Pope's Moral Essays, 1731-35), or else a character within the work itself, who is called the adversarius and whose major artistic function is to elicit and add credibility

To the satiric speaker's comments. (In Pope's "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," 1735, Arbuthnot serves as adversarius.) Two types of formal satire are commonly distinguished, taking their names from the great Roman satirists Horace and Juvenal. The types are defined by the character of the persona whom the author presents as the first-person satiric speaker, and also by the attitude and tone that such a persona manifests

Toward both the subject matter and the readers of the work.

In Horatian satire the speaker manifests the character of an urbane, witty, and tolerant man of the world, who is moved more often to wry amusement than to indignation at the spectacle of human folly, pretentiousness, and hypocrisy, and who uses a relaxed and informal language to evoke from readers a wry smile at human failings and absurdities—sometimes including his own. Horace himself described his aim as "to laugh people out of their vices and follies." Pope's Moral Essays and other formal satires for the most part sustain a Horatian stance.

In Juvenalian satire the character of the speaker is that of a serious moralist who uses a dignified and public style of utterance to decry modes of vice and error which are no less dangerous because they are ridiculous, and who undertakes to evoke from readers contempt, moral indignation, or unillusioned sadness at the aberrations of humanity. Samuel Johnson's "London" (1738) and "The Vanity of Human Wishes" (1749) are distinguished instances of Juvenilia

Satire. In its most denunciatory modes, it resembles the jeremiad, whose model is not Roman but Hebraic.

(2) Indirect satire is cast in some other literary form than that of direct address to the reader. The most common indirect form is that of a fictional narrative, in which the objects of the satire are characters who make themselves and their opinions ridiculous or obnoxious by what they think, say, and do, and are sometimes made even more ridiculous by the author's comments and narrative style. One type of indirect satire is Menippean satire, modeled on a Greek form developed by the Cynic philosopher Menippus. It is sometimes called Varronian satire, after a Roman imitator, Varrò; while Northrop Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism, pp. 308-12, suggests an alternative name, the anatomy, after a major English instance of the type, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). Such satires are written

In prose, usually with interpolations of verse, and constitute a miscellaneous form often held together by a loosely constructed narrative. A major feature is a series of extended dialogues and debates (often conducted at a banquet or party) in which a group of loquacious eccentrics, pedants, literary people, and representatives of various professions or philosophical points of view serve to make ludicrous the attitudes and viewpoints they typify by the arguments they urge in their support. Examples are Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel (1564), Voltaire's Candied (1759), Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey

(1818) and other satiric fiction, and Huxley's Point Counter Point (1928); in this last novel, as in those of Peacock, the central satiric scenes are discussions and disputes during a weekend at a country manor. Frye also classifies Lewis Carroll's two books about Alice in Wonderland as "perfect Menippean satires."

             

            It should be noted that any narrative or other literary vehicle can be adapted to the purposes of indirect satire. John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel turns Old Testament history into a satiric allegory on Restoration political maneuverings. In Gulliver's Travels Swift converts to satiric use the early eighteenth-century accounts of voyage and discovery,

And his Modest Proposal is written in the form of a project in

Political economy. Many of Joseph Addison's Spectator papers are satiric essays; Byron's Don Juan is a versified satiric form of the old episodic picaresque fiction; Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, Moliere’s The Misanthrope, Wycherley's The Country Wife, and Shaw's Arms and the Man are satiric plays; and Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, and other

Works such as John Gay's eighteenth-century Beggar's Opera and its modern adaptation by Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera (1928), are satiric operettas. T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) employs motifs from myth in a work which can be considered as by and large a verse satire directed against what Eliot perceives as the spiritual dearth in twentieth-century life. The greatest number of recent satires, however,

are written in prose, and especially in novelistic form; for example Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, Joseph Heller's Catch-22, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Player Piano and Cat's Cradle. Much of the current vogue of black humor occurs in satiric works whose butt is what the author conceives to be the widespread contemporary condition of social cruelty, inanity, or chaos. Effective English satire has been written in every period beginning with the middle Ages. Pieces in the English Punch and the American New Yorker demonstrate that formal essayistic satire, like satiric novels and plays, still commands a wide audience; and W. H. Auden is a twentieth-century author who wrote excellent satiric poems. The proportioning of the examples in this article, however, indicates ho large the Restoration and eighteenth century loom in satiric achievement: the century and a half that included Dryden, the Earl of Rochester, Samuel Butler, Wycherley, Amphora Behan, Addison, Pope, Lady Mary Worley Montagu, Swift, Gay, Fielding, Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, and late in the period (it should not be overlooked) the Robert Burns of "The Holy Fair" and "Holy Willie's Prayer" and the William Blake of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. This same span of time was also in France the period of such major satirists as Boileau, La Fontaine, and Voltaire, as well as Molière, the most eminent of all satirists in drama. American satire broke free of English in the nineteenth century with the light satiric touch of Washington Irving's Sketch Book, the deft satiric essays of Oliver Wendell Holmes (The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table), and above all the satiric essays and novels of Mark Twain.

             See also light verse. The articles on burlesque, on irony, and on wit, humor, and the comic describe some of the derogatory modes and devices

Available to satirists. Consult James Sutherland, English Satire

(1958);

Gilbert Highet, the Anatomy of Satire (1962);

Alvin B. Kernan,

The Plot of Satire (1965); Matthew Hodgart, Satire (1969); Charles

Sanders, the Scope of Satire (1971);

 Michael Seidel, Satiric Inheritance,

Rabelais to Sterne (1979);

Dustin Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction(1994).

 Anthologies: Ronald Paulson, ed., Satire: Modern Essays in Criticism(1971);

Ashley Brown and John L. Kimmey, eds., Satire: An Anthology

(1977),

 Which includes both satiric writings and critical essays

On sat   ire.

Paper-7 Time and Space in The Shadow Lines

Hitesh S. Vaghani

Roll no. - 21

SEM - II

Paper no. – 07

Year – 2010-11

Topic: Time and Space in The Shadow Lines

Submitted to Mr. Devarshi Mehta

Department of English,

Bhavnagar University.

The Shadow Lines by Amitav Gosh paints a landscape of symbolism and realism that spans both time and space. The concepts of distance and time are uniquely portrayed in both the physical borders that divide countries and the imaginary borders that divide human beings. From the image-conscious character of the grandmother to the riots that explode in the streets, Gosh takes the reader on a fascinating journey of exploration, dissecting the characters of the story while simultaneously dissecting the human race.

                The title of the novel is perhaps the most philosophical statement Gosh makes, asserting that 'The Shadow Lines', or the lines that not only define our human shape but our inner struggles to choose between darkness and light, are an intricate part of all human existence. Shadows, like time, are both tangible and intangible at any given moment or realm of perspective. They are a fleeting, generically depicted, generally distorted representations of ourselves, and they can only be viewed in the proper light. Gosh uses shadow lines as a way of telling us that the way we view ourselves is not always the way that others view us, and until we can gain a deeper understanding of ourselves we will remain in the shadows of our own enlightenment.

Gosh manages to speak excessively of shadows, darkness and light, weaving them subtly into the context of what he is trying to convey. He uses the terms both realistically and metaphorically to show that the shadow we cast, the one other people can see, is not always an accurate reflection of which we really are. Nick was not the hero he seemed to be and when May reveals this to the boy, they are in the process of moving from light to dark, both in physical environment and knowledge of the truth. In a way, a shadow is like a "fair weather friend" in that it appears to us only when the sun is directly overhead. While every human being casts a unique shadow, a common theme can be seen in them all, namely that they are just as much a part of us as they are detached from us. This is another realm in which Gosh metaphorically uses the elements of shadow lines to tell his story.

---

             Throughoutliterature’s long history, shadows have been used as metaphors for secrets. Things hidden in the shadows, things which we cannot see though we can vaguely make out their outlines…These are the traditional metaphors which Gosh cannot avoid. Gosh demonstrates that when secrets come out from behind the shadows and are exposed to the stark,   revealing brilliance of daylight, they do not immediately evaporate. Secrets tend to linger long after they've been exposed because the fact that they were hidden in the first place casts strong shadows of doubt upon the person keeping the secret. The revelation of these secrets can have severe consequences, such as being kicked out of school or being labeled a liar. Though the grandmother's "letter from the grave" is eventually dismissed, its mere existence taught the boy some valuable lessons.

The narrator's secret love for his cousin Ila was forced to remain in the shadows because the feeling itself, was dark in nature. Anything that is considered taboo, such as sexual relations between members of the same family, automatically quivers in the shadows of its own dark truths. Both of the major truths that the grandmother exposed was laden with sexual taboos, which raises the question, should they ever have been exposed at all? In light of the pain they caused, one would think not, but in a world in which truth is the foundation of evolution into maturity, how can one claim that any truth should remain unilluminated?

On the one hand, Ila's enlightenment to her cousin's feelings for her was good in that it marked a promise of change in her behavior towards him which she hoped would help to dissipate his obsession. On the other hand, from the narrator's viewpoint, this revelation and his cousin's subsequent rejection caused him a great deal of emotional distress. Should his feelings have remained in the shadows, he may not have endured this sharp, heart-stabbing pain, yet he may have been subjected a long, slow torture instead. The answer to whether this truth should have been revealed lies in which kind of pain the narrator finds less troubling.

While the title’ The Shadow Lines' can be read a thousand different ways, and the significance of shadows throughout the novel can be interpreted with vast distinctions, one thing remains clear. The shadows that all human beings reflect are as unique to the individual as each written word is to a talented author like Amitav Gosh.

             Amitav Gosh chooses to tell a story that pervades through the seams of reality and fiction, of time and space, of memories and beliefs. The Shadow Lines is Gosh’s second novel, who has overtime secured his place as one of the India’s most celebrated authors in English. Gosh’s work is known to be imbued with intricate details of the given time and situation, which he writes about and his words are filled with a wealth of meaning. Having penned several novels gosh’s seen to reinvent himself with his every work but The Shadow Lines undoubtedly remains one his best.

           The Shadow Lines is a story told by a nameless narrator in recollection. It’s a non linear tale told as if putting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in the memory of the narrator. This style of writing is both unique and captivating; unfolding ideas together as time and space coalesce and help the narrator understand his past better. Revolving around the theme of nationalism in an increasingly globalized world, Gosh questions the real meaning of political freedom and the borders which virtually seem to both establish and separate. The novel traverses through almost seventy years through the memories of people, which the narrator recollects and narrates, giving their viewpoint along with his own. Though the novel is based largely in Kolkata, Dhaka and London, it seems to echo the sentiments of whole South-east Asia, with lucid overtones of Independence and the pangs of Partition.

             It is a story of a middle class Indian family based in Calcutta. The boy narrator presents the views of the members of his immediate and extended family, thus, giving each a well defined character. However, Tha’mma, narrator’s grandmother is the most realized character in the novel, giving a distinct idea of the idealism and the enthusiasm with which the people worked towards nation building just after independence. It is chiefly through her character that Gosh delivers the most powerful message of the novel; the vainness of creating nation states, the absurdity of drawing lines which arbitrarily divide people when their memories remain undivided. All the characters are well rounded. In Tridib, the narrator’s uncle, Gosh draws one of the most unique characters of our times. Narrator’s fascination with him is understandable as Tridib travels the world through his imagination. Gosh subtly tries to undo the myth that boundaries restrict as there are no barriers in imagination. Though Gosh is a little mean to narrator’s cousin and childhood love, Ila, but her thus portrayal is crucial to showcase the confusions which the people who live away from their native place, harbour and the prejudices they face. Gosh gives adequate space to the British Price family and unlike most authors, he doesn’t stereotype them.

           Amitav Gosh has to say about “The Shadow Lines”: a book that led me backward in time to earlier memories of riots, ones witnessed in childhood. It became a book not about any one event but about the meaning of such events and their effects on the individuals who live through them.

             It is difficult to describe the book any better this. While the central, climactic event – that of a single riot which changed the lives of several people unwillingly pulled into its vortex – is only revealed in the end, the narrator’s journey through the “shadow lines” of geopolitical boundaries, through the past and present, is really an attempt to find some meaning of such meaningless violence.

                At one level, it is all about personal relationships. There are a surprising number of characters, given the relatively short length less than 250 pages in the first hardcover American edition, and I found myself fumbling between family hierarchies. Essentially there’s the narrator’s family, and the family of their close English friends.

               As evident, the characters span three generations. I have highlighted the ones of central interest. Grandmother and Mayadebi are sisters, who grew up in Dhaka before the partition. While Mayadebi, the more gregarious of the two, marries a diplomat and enjoys a life of stature abroad, Grandmother loses her husband in Kolkata and has to fend for herself and her only son, the narrator’s father. She’s a fighter, refuses any charity, and manages to raise her son, the narrator’s father, who eventually becomes a successful executive.

Paper-6 Synaesthetic Imageries in John Keats

Hitesh S. Vaghani

Roll no. - 21

SEM - II

Paper no. – 06

Year – 2010-11

Topic: Synaesthetic Imageries in John Keats

Submitted to Mr. Jay Mehta

Department of English,

Bhavnagar University.

John Keats lived only twenty-five years and four months 1795-1821, yet his poetic achievement is extraordinary. His writing career lasted a little more than five years (1814-1820), and three of his great odes--"Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and "Ode on Melancholy"--were written in one month. Most of his major poems were written between his twenty-third and twenty-fourth years, and all his poems were written by his twenty-fifth year. In this brief period, he produced poems that rank him as one of the great English poets. He also wrote letters which T.S. Eliot calls "the most notable and the most important ever written by any English poet."

      His genius was not generally perceived during his lifetime or immediately after his death. Keats, dying, expected his poetry to be forgotten, as the epitaph he wrote for his tombstone indicates: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." But nineteenth century critics and readers did come to appreciate him, though, for the most part, they had only a partial understanding of his work. They saw Keats as a sensual poet; they focused on his vivid, concrete imagery; on his portrayal of the physical and the passionate; and on his immersion in the here and now. One nineteenth century critic went so far as to assert not merely that Keats had "a mind constitutionally inapt for abstract thinking," but that he "had no mind." Keats's much-quoted outcry, "O for a life of Sensation rather than of Thoughts!" letter, November 22, 1817 has been cited to support this view.

      With the twentieth century, the perception of Keats's poetry expanded; he was and is praised for his seriousness and thoughtfulness, for his dealing with difficult human conflicts and artistic issues, and for his impassioned mental pursuit of truth. Keats advocated living "the ripest, fullest experience that one is capable of"; he believed that what determines truth is experience ("axioms are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses"). The publication of Keats's letters, with their keen intellection questioning and concern with moral and artistic problems, contributed to this re-assessment. His letters throw light on his own poetic practices and provide insight into writing in general.

Keats and Romanticism

      Keats belonged to a literary movement called romanticism. Romantic poets, because of their theories of literature and life, were drawn to lyric poetry; they even developed a new form of ode, often called the Romantic meditative ode.

      The literary critic Jack Still lingers describes the typical movement of the romantic ode: The poet, unhappy with the real world, escapes or attempts to escape into the ideal. Disappointed in his mental flight, he returns to the real world. Usually he returns because human beings cannot live in the ideal or because he has not found what he was seeking. But the experience changes his understanding of his situation, of the world, etc.; his views/feelings at the end of the poem differ significantly from those he held at the beginning of the poem.

Themes in Keats's Major Poems

      Douglas Bush noted that "Keats's important poems are related to, or grow directly out of...inner conflicts." For example, pain and pleasure are intertwined in "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn"; love is intertwined with pain, and pleasure is intertwined with death in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil."

      Cleanthes Brooks defines the paradox that is the theme of "Ode to a Nightingale" somewhat differently: "the world of imagination offers a release from the painful world of actuality, yet at the same time it renders the world of actuality more painful by contrast."

      Other conflicts appear in Keats's poetry:

·         transient sensation or passion / enduring art

·         dream or vision / reality

·         joy / melancholy

·         the ideal / the real

·         mortal / immortal

·         life / death

·         separation / connection

·         being immersed in passion / desiring to escape passion

     Keats often associated love and pain both in his life and in his poetry.  He wrote of a young woman he found attractive, "When she comes into a room she makes an impression the same as the Beauty of a Leopardess.... I should like her to ruin me..."  Love and death are intertwined in "Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil," "Bright Star," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "La Belle Dame sans Merci."  The Fatal Woman (the woman whom it is destructive to love, like Salome, Lilith, and Cleopatra) appears in”La Belle Dame sans Merci” and "Lamia."

     Identity is an issue in his view of the poet and for the dreamers in his odes (e.g., "Ode to a Nightingale") and narrative poems.  Of the poetic character, he says, "... it is not itself--it has no self--it is everything and nothing--it has no character--it enjoys light and shade--it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, right or poor, mean or elevated..." He calls the poet "chameleon."

     Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling summarize Keats's world view succinctly:

Beyond the uncompromising sense that we are completely physical in a physical world, and the allied realization that we are compelled to imagine more than we can know or understand, there is a third quality in Keats more clearly present than in any other poet since Shakespeare. This is the gift of tragic acceptance, which persuades us that Keats was the least solipsistic of poets, the one most able to grasp the individuality and reality of selves totally distinct from his own, and of an outward world that would survive his perception of it.

They believe that Keats came to accept this world, the here and now, as the ultimate value.

Keats's Odes

      All written in May 1819, "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and "Ode on Melancholy" grew out of

a persistent kind of experience which dominated Keats's feelings, attitudes, and thoughts during that time. Each of them is a unique experience, but each of them is also, as it were, a facet of a larger experience. This larger experience is an intense awareness of the joy and pain, the happiness and the sorrow, of human life. This awareness is feeling and becomes also thought, a kind of brooding as the poet sees them in others and feels them in him. This awareness is not only feeling; it becomes also thought, a kind of brooding contemplation of the lot of human beings, who must satisfy their desire for happiness in a world where joy and pain are inevitably and inextricably tied together. This union of joy and pain is the fundamental fact of human experience that Keats has observed and accepted as true.

Wright Thomas and Stuart Gerry Brown

     In "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Keats tries to free himself from the world of change by identifying with the nightingale, representing nature, or the urn, representing art. These odes, as well as "The Ode to Psyche" and the "Ode to Melancholy," present the poet as dreamer; the question in these odes, as well as in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" and "The Eve of St. Agnes," is how Keats characterizes the dream or vision. Is it a positive experience which enriches the dreamer? or is it a negative experience which has the potential to cut off the dreamer from the real world and destroy him? What happens to the dreamers who do not awaken from the dream or do not awaken soon enough?

Keats's Imagery

      Keats's imagery ranges among all our physical sensations: sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, temperature, weight, pressure, hunger, thirst, sexuality, and movement. Keats repeatedly combines different senses in one image, that is, he attributes the trait(s) of one sense to another, a practice called synaesthesia. His Synaesthetic imagery performs two major functions in his poems: it is part of their sensual effect, and the combining of senses normally experienced as separate suggests an underlying unity of dissimilar happenings, the oneness of all forms of life. Richard H. Fogle calls these images the product of his "unrivaled ability to absorb, sympathize with, and humanize natural objects."

Examples of Synaesthetic Images

"Ode to a Nightingale"

• In some MELODIOUS plot / Of BEECHEN GREEN (stanza I)

Combines sound ("melodious") and sight ("beechen green")

• TASTING of Flora and the country green,
     Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
  O for a beaker of the warm South, (stanza II)

Here the poet TASTES the visual ("Flora and the country green"), activity ("Dance"), sound ("Provencal song"), and mood or pleasure ("mirth"); also the visual ("sunburnt") is combined with a pleasurable emotional state ("mirth"). With the beaker there is finally something to taste, but what is being tasted is temperature ("warm") and a location ("South").

• But here is no LIGHT, Save what from heaven is with the BREEZES BLOWN (stanza IV)

Combines sight ("light") with touch/movement ("breezes blown"). This image describes light filtering through leaves moved by the wind.

• Nor what SOFT INCENSE HANGS upon the boughs (stanza V)

Combines touch ("soft"), weight ("hangs"), and smell ("incense).

"Eve of St. Agnes"

• The SILVER, SNARLING trumpets 'gan to chide

Combines vision ("silver," the color of the trumpets) and sound (trumpets produce a "silver" sound).

"Isabella; or, The Pot of Gold"

• And TASTE the MUSIC of that VISION pale. (stanza XLIX)

Now it's your turn. What three sensory experiences are combined in this line?

Paintings and Illustrations of Keats's Poems

Keats's poems have appealed to artists and illustrators, particularly from the 1840's through the 1930s. Three poems have received the most attention--Edition, Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil, and The Eve of St. Agnes. According to Richard Altaic, at least twenty paintings and illustrations have been made of each of these poems. Keats's appeal for painters and illustrators is a tribute to how vivid and sensual his imagery is and how his poems stimulate the imagination of his readers. There are other reasons why painters and illustrators were drawn to him: he wrote about art and artists and was friendly with many artists; also the publication of his collected works in 1840 and of a biography in 1848 aroused a general interest in Keats and helped to establish his position as one of England's greatest poets.

As a Web project, Renzo Podlodowski illustrated three of Keats's poems, drew Keats listening to a nightingale in the garden of his friend Brown, and also made a drawing of Ophelia. They are mounted as thumbnails in an art gallery on this.

Constant endeavor to escape to a word of eternal beauty and joy but in this endeavor he does not always succeed.

Beauty is truth. Truth is beauty. The truth is that Keats’s yearning passion for the beautiful is not a passion of the sensuous or sentimental poet. It is an intellectual and spiritual passion.