Friday, 1 April 2016

Post-colonialism is a period of time after colonialism, and post-colonial literature is typically characterized by its opposition to the colonial postcolonial literature often focuses on race relations and the effects of racism.

Postcolonial studies is concerned, as the chapter on theories explores, the oppression of the non-European races by European ones, Cultural studies in a globalized age also needs to be conscious of the racial zed nature of globalized/globalizing culture. That is the theme of race and unequal relations has to be worked into any analysis of global cultures. For instance, we need to ask how Hollywood films circulate globally. Does the fact that audiences in Asia or Africa will be viewing these films influence the film maker? How does a Hollywood film appear to poorer nations in these areas of the world? Think of films like Romancing the Stone, Indian Jones and Blood Diamond which explore other cultures how are these conceived by Americans and received by other parts of the world?

Let’s discuss Hollywood film Blood Diamond related to postcolonialism.

Blood Diamond

Director: Edward Zwick

Produced by: Marshall Herskovitz

Written by: Charles Leavitt

Blood Diamond is a 2006 American- German political war thriller film co produced and directed by Edward Zwick. The title refers to blood diamonds, which are diamonds mined in war Zones and sold to finance conflicts, and thereby profit warlords and diamond companies across the world.

This film is powerful film, and the best picture. It combines action, drama and romance with a heart wrenching look at violence in Africa. The story is captivating and builds to an emotional ending. There is a lot of violence and “Blood Diamond” is certainly not for children. This film instead to paint a realistic picture of the horrors of civil war. Blood Diamond a thriller that promises and delivers in great style. This story centres around two men –one black, one white.

Set during the Sierra Leone Civil war in 1996-2001, the film depicts a country torn apart by the struggle between government loyalists and insurgent forces. It also portrays many of the atrocities of that war, including the rebel’s amputation of people’s hands to discourage them from voting in upcoming elections.

The film’s ending, in which a conference is held concerning blood diamonds, refers to a historic meeting that took place in Kimberley, South Africa in 2000. The film received mixed but generally favourable reviews, with praise directed mainly to the performances of Di Caprio and Hounsou; they were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor and Best supporting Actor, respectively.

Simon During, noted cultural theorist, outlines a set of reasons for connecting Post colonialism with globalization studies (2000).

1) All culture now is linked with the supply of money.

2) All cultures now have transnational subsidiaries, opponents or collaborations.

3) Cultures are no more territorial and hence do not cohere or fuse into wholes or ‘traditions’.

Lagaan

Director: Ashutosh Gowariker

Produced by: Amir Khan and Mansoor Khan

Written by: K. P. Saxena

Release dates: 15 June 2001.

Lagaan means “tax” – the tax paid by Indian subjects to their British overloads; and the film Lagaan, set during the Victorian era, is about a tax revolt by overburdened villagers. The tax revolt crisis leads to a cricket match challenge between the villagers, who have never played the game before- led by Amir Khan, in the role that propelled him to stardom- and the British. It’s a feel- good movie on a grand scale about national pride made by the same director as Jodha Akbar, Ashutosh Gowariker, but earlier in his career. It’s great to watch post-colonial people talking pride in their culture and history, even if it means playing up stereo types and formulaic plot lines. Amir Khan is awesome.

An analysis of the use of cricket metaphor in Ashutosh’s film indicates how cricket, the once proud cultural form of colonial Britain, is subverted in such a way that it becomes a tool for decolonization. According to Appadural, “decolonization is a dialogue with the colonial past, and not a simple dismantling of the colonial habits and modes of life”. This treatment of cricket, which is more of an appropriation of a reality that is fundamentally colonial in character than of a rejection of the reality, provides important insights into the tension between colonialism and post colonialism his appropriation problematizes the conception of a dichotomous relationship between colonialism and post colonialism and introduce a sense of historical continuity to the broader picture of which the phases of colonialism and post colonialism are part. It introduces a perspective that recognizes certain possibilities for post colonialism in colonialism and an element of colonialism in post colonialism.

Lagaan is a massive film and it has a lot of relevance to my literary studies, so I have an inclination to talk of it like a work of literature within the realm of British colonialism- Indian nationalism and postcolonial discourse. Lagaan’s engagement in themes of nationalism, colonialism and reverse colonialism came out than was healthy. Aamir himself says, is always entertainment at its heart. Lagaan is an intellectual interest in colonial British India and subsequently postcolonialism. Lagaan is, perhaps above all other things, a story of Indian nationalism in rejection of British colonial control. In order to save their village, which is being taxed to the point of starvation, a group of men band together to fight against the odds and play a game they don’t understand against their English overlords. It isn’t necessarily nationalism in the strictest sense because it is limited mostly to one village with some other characters, like the Sikh Deva, joining from elsewhere- but I consider it a representative microcosm at the very least as Indians come together across class boundaries in the united defence of their land.

If you want to understand cricket- and even more, if you want to understand some of the attachment of Indians to cricket- Lagaan is a good place to start. Talking about cricket is also a good place to start with Lagaan. Coming into the film with knowledge of cricket isn’t necessary but if you don’t like cricket, you may want to beware. There is much more to the film than cricket- in fact, cricket is just the vehicle of the film’s greater colonial themes.

Lagaan also points to the dichotomy of cricket with reference to colonialism. It is both a rejection of and a lingering attachment to the British Raj. It offers both the chance to beat the colonizer at his own game and the chance to join the colonizer’s game, playing by his rules. This is what I consider one of the most fascinating lingering effects of colonialism on India: the fervent, fanatical, almost religious attachment that Indians have to a game given to them by colonialism.

Lagaan perhaps seeks to point out a reason for this fanatical attachment that seems to defy logic. It began as a way to best the colonial. The men become so familiar and obsessed with the game in their intense desire to beat the British. The film also contains several Indian characters who at first play along with the British colonials for various reasons, most of whom are not faulted for their association with the British. All, however, ultimately find that their allegiance is to their countrymen, and the expression of their shifted loyalties all comes out within the heat of the cricket match. Three such characters fill this “wavering Indian” role: Lakha, who spies on the Indian team for the British because of his personal hatred for Bhuvan; Ram Singh, who acts as an aide and translator until he is struck at the match by Russell; and the provincial Raja, who throughout occupies a precarious position that straddles the two worlds. If themes of colonialism pervade and consume even the sports match in Lagaan, the film’s love story is also able to evade the trappings of reverse colonial discourse. The religious story is added perhaps as an attempt to distance the Bhuvan Elizabeth relationship from its actual basis in racialized revererse- colonial politics. It is an attempt to make sense of a relationship that is about colonialism without using colonialism; in other words, it’s trying to disguise the fact that it is about race and colonialism by using religion as an alternate framework.

Lagaan creates a real character facing pressure from overhead to collect more taxes and increase a grip on the peasants- a pressure he in turn takes out on those beneath him. Russell also has a real family in Elizabeth, a sister who runs off to teach his enemies how to beat him in the cricket match that his career rides on. Irony for Russell and his singleminded colonialism comes at the film’s end, when he is shipped off to central Africa. There, of course, Russell will continue to participate in colonialism, but among peoples even darker-skinned and more violent than the Indians.

1) Hindi films being financed by non-resident Indians.

2) Hindi films and their popularity in other countries where both non-resident Indians and others watch them.

3) The stage shows performed by Hindi film stars abroad, extending Bollywood culture in other ways.

Conclusion

The Lagaan film is set in the Victorian period of India’s colonial British Raj. Blood Diamond film is rarity these days that we see films that are set in Africa, which show the poverty, dictatorship, conscription, war and pain of a nation. Thus, we can say that Lagaan and Blood Diamond these two movies are related to postcolonialism and cultural studies
.

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Important Concept in Gerard Genette’s Narratology

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Name Joshi Tejasvi A

Course M.A. Sem 02

Roll no. 21

Paper no. 07 (Literary Theory &Criticism)

Batch- 2015-17

Topic: Important Concept in Gerard Genette’s Narratology

Submitted to: Department of English

Gerard Genette - Important Concepts in Genette's Narratology

1 Life

2 Works

3 Important concept of Genette’s Narratology

3.1 Order

3.2 Frequency

3.3 Duration

3.4 Voice

3.5 Mood

Life

Genette was born in Paris, where he studied at the Lycee Lakanal and the Ecole Normale Superieure.
After leaving the French communist party, Genette was a member of Socialisms ou Barbarie during 1957-8.
He received his professorship in French literature at the Sorbonne in 1967.
In 1970 he, Helene Cixous and Tzvetan Todorov founded the journal poeticque and he edited a series of the same name for Editions du seuil.
Among other positions, Genette was research director at the Ecole des hautes etudec en sciences socials and a visiting professor at Yale University.
Work
Gérard Genette's work (1972 and 1983) fits into the German and Anglo-Saxon academic tradition, and is intended to serve as both a culmination and a renewal of this school of narratological criticism. We should point out that internal analysis, like any semiotic analysis, exhibits two characteristics. Firstly, it is concerned with narratives as independent linguistic objects, detached from their context of production and reception. Secondly, it aims to reveal an underlying structure that can be identified in many different narratives.
Genette is largely responsible for the reintroduction of a rhetorical vocabulary into literary criticism, for example such terms as trop and metonymy. Additionally his work on narrative, best known in English through the selection Narrative Discourse: an Essay in Method, has been of importance. His major work is the multi-part Figures series, of which Narrative Discourse is a section. His trilogy on Textual transcendence, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second degree (1982), and Para texts. Thresholds of interpretation (1997).

Important concepts in Genette's Narratology
This outline of Genette's Narratology is derived from Narrative Discourse: an Essay in Method. This book forms part of his multi-volume work Figures I-III. The examples used in it are mainly drawn from Proust's epic In search of lost time. One criticism which had been used against previous forms of Narratology was that they could deal only with simple stories, such as Vladimir Propp’s work in Morphology of the folk tale. If Narratology could cope with Proust, this could no longer be said.
Below are the five main concepts used by Genette in Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. They are primarily used to look at the syntax of narratives, rather than to perform an interpretation of them.

Order

Say a story is narrated as follows: the clues of a murder are discovered by a detective (event A); the circumstances of the murder are finally revealed (event B); and lastly the murderer is caught (event C).
Add corresponding numbers to the lettered events that represent their order chronologically: 1, 2, and 3.
If these events were described chronologically, they would run A1, B2, and C3. Arranged in the text, however, they run B1 (discovery), A2 (flashback), C3 (resolution).

This accounts for the 'obvious' effects the reader will recognise, such as flashback. It also deals with the structure of narratives on a more systematic basis, accounting for flash-forward, simultaneity, as well as possible, if rarely used effects. These disarrangements on the level of order are termed 'anachrony'.

Order is the relation between the sequencing of events in the story and their arrangement in the narrative. A narrator may choose to present the events in the order they occurred, that is, chronologically, or he can recount them out of order. For example, detective novels often begin with a murder that has to be solved. The events preceding the crime, along with the facts leading to the killer, are presented afterwards. The order in which the events actually occurred does not match the order in which they are presented in the narrative. This mixing of temporal order yields a more gripping, complex plot.
The term Genette uses to designate non-chronological order is anachrony. There are two types of anachrony:
1. Analepsis: The narrator recounts after the fact an event that took place earlier than the present point in the main story.
Example (fictitious): I woke up in a good mood this morning. In my mind were memories of my childhood, with Mum singing every morning, her voice ringing out.
2. Prolepsis: The narrator anticipates events that will occur after the main story ends.
Example (fictitious): How will my adventure in Europe affect me? I will never be able to look at my family and friends in the same way; surely I will become contentious and distant.
There are two factors that can enter into analepsis and prolepsis: reach and extent. "An anachrony can reach into the past or the future, either more or less far from the "present" moment (that is, from the moment in the story when the narrative was interrupted to make room for the anachrony): this temporal distance we will name the anachrony's reach. The anachrony itself can also cover duration of story that is more or less long: we will call this its extent"
Anachronies can have several functions in a narrative. While analepses often take on an explanatory role, developing a character's psychology by relating events from his past, prolepses can arouse the reader's curiosity by partially revealing facts that will surface later.

Frequency

The separation between an event and its narration allows several possibilities.

An event can occur once and be narrated once (singular).

'Today I went to the shop.'

An event can occur n times and be narrated once (iterative).

'I used to go to the shop.'

An event can occur once and be narrated n times (repetitive).

'Today I went to the shop' + 'Today he went to the shop' etc.

An event can occur n times and be narrated n times (multiple).

'I used to go to the shop' + 'He used to go to the shop' + 'I went to the shop yesterday' etc.

Duration

The separation between an event and its narration means that there is discourse time and narrative time. These are the two main elements of duration.

"Five years passed", has a lengthy narrative time, five years, but a short discourse time (it only took a second to read).
James Joyce's novel Ulysses has a relatively short narrative time, twenty-four hours. Not many people, however, could read Ulysses in twenty-four hours. Thus it is safe to say it has a lengthy discourse time.

Voice

Voice is concerned with who narrates, and from where. This can be split four ways.

Where the narration is from

Intra-diegetic: inside the text. e.g. Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White
Extra-diegetic: outside the text. e.g. Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Is the narrator a character in the story?

Hetero-diegetic: the narrator is not a character in the story. e.g. Homer's The Odyssey
Homo-diegetic: the narrator is a character in the story. e.g. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights

NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE
A distinction should be made between narrative voice and narrative perspective; the latter is the point of view adopted by the narrator, which Genette calls focalization. "So by focalization I certainly mean a restriction of 'field' – actually, that is, a selection of narrative information with respect to what was traditionally called omniscience". These are matters of perception: the one who perceives is not necessarily the one who tells, and vice versa.

Mood

Genette said narrative mode is dependent on the 'distance' and 'perspective' of the narrator, and like music, narrative mode has predominant patterns. It is related to voice.
Distance of the narrator changes with narrated speech, transposed speech and reported speech.
Perspective of the narrator is called focalization. Narratives can be non-focalized, internally focalized or externally focalized.
In order to understand narratology's contribution to semiotics, it is important to grasp the distinction between its three fundamental entities: story, narrative and narration. The story generally corresponds to a series of events and actions that are told by someone (the narrator), and represented in some final form, producing a narrative. As a field of study, Narratology looks at the internal mechanisms of narrative, the form taken by a narrated story.

In the field of narrative discourse, we endeavour to identify the common, near-universal principles of text composition. Thus, we attempt to discern what relations are possible between the elements of the narrative/story/narration triad. These relations operate within four analytical categories: mood, the narrative instance, level and time.

NARRATIVE MOOD

When a text is written, technical choices must be made in view of producing a particular result in the story's verbal representation. In this way, the narrative employs distancing and other effects to create a particular narrative mood that governs "the regulation of narrative information" provided to the reader. According to Genette, all narrative is necessarily diegesis (telling), in that it can attain no more than an illusion of mimesis (showing) by making the story real and alive.
For Genette, then, a narrative cannot in fact imitate reality, no matter how realistic; it is intended to be a fictional act of language arising from a narrative instance. "Narrative does not 'represent' a (real or fictive) story, it recounts it – that is, it signifies it by means of language. There is no place for imitation in narrative".
Thus, in place of the two main traditional narrative moods, diegesis and mimesis, Genette contends that there are simply varying degrees of diegesis, with the narrator either more involved or less involved in the narrative, and leaving less room or more room for the narrative act. However, Genette insists that in no case is the narrator completely absent.
Conclusion
Genette has developed a theory of Narratological poetics that may be used to address the entire inventory of narrative processes in use. According to Genette, every text discloses traces of narration, which can be studied in order to understand exactly how the narrative is organized. The approach advocated here clearly addresses a level that lies below the threshold of interpretation, and as such, it constitutes a solid foundation, complementing other research being done in the social sciences, e.g., in sociology, literary history, ethnology and psychoanalysis.

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Salient features of Victorian age and its poets too

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Name- Joshi Tejasvi A

Course- M.A. Sem- 2

Roll no. 21

Paper no.0 6 (((Victorian Age)

Batch- 2015-17

Topic:-Salient features of Victorian age and its poets too

Submitted to- Department of English

Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Introduction

The Victorian Age

The Victorian age is believed to be from 1850-1900 when Victoria became Queen in 1837; English literature seemed to have entered upon a period of lean years, in marked contrast with the poetic fruitfulness of the romantic age. Victorian age is regarded as a very important period of English Literature. In this age all forms of literature developed like poetry, novel, essay etc. Many writers gave their unique contribution in making this age important. In this age, the long struggle of the Anglo- Saxons for personal liberty was settled and democracy was established.

Salient Features

1) An era of peace (the oxford movement)

2) Conflict between science and religion

3) Material Development

4) Intellectual Development

5) Morality

6) The Revolt

7) The new Education

8) International Influences

9) The Achievement of the age

The Victorian age is especially marked because of its rapid progress in all the arts and sciences and in mechanical inventions like spinning looms to steamboats and from matches to electric lights. All these material things as well as the growth of education have their influence upon the life of a people, and it is inevitable that they should react upon its prose and poetry; though as yet we are too much absorbed in our sciences and mechanics to determine accurately their influence upon literature. This age can be called as the Age of Compromise. In other words, we can say, there was death of agriculture. When everyone went to city, it became overpopulated. As people were working in industries, they got money and food but getting shelter was their main problem. There was dark and gloomy atmosphere everywhere. Majority of people were poor. The dominant people were money minded and so humans were used as machines. Workhouses were getting full as people were in search of job to earn money.

Workhouses looked like prisons. They were given a fixed amount of meal. Women were kept away from men and their husbands too. Children too were kept away from adults. The people in the workhouses had to work for twelve hours whether it is a child or an adult. They had the permission to bath once in a week. Ill people were kept in sick wards. A number orphanages and prostitutes increased as woman many a times didn’t get work anywhere. She had to involve in prostitution and then chances of getting pregnant increased.

If this happened, the lady had to deliver the child and then left that child to orphanages. There was severe socio-economic depression people were threatened by the name of God. People had to work in harsh conditions as there was not enough. Electricity each job was hard and everyone hard to suffer a lot.

Achievements

The Oxford movement

This movement took place in the nineteenth century. It was an outcome of a long controversy and ideological conflicts amongst different Christian sects and Churches and therefore it may be called a religious movement. Its name was Oxford movement as it was cantered at the University of Oxford that sought a renewal of Catholic or Roman Catholic, thought and practice within the Church of England in opposition to the Protestant tendencies of the church. This movement is also called Tractarianism Movement as it was carried throughout the tracts and pamphlets. The origin of the Oxford movement can be traced to the opposition of the scientific discoveries against age old religious beliefs and faiths. The aim of the movement was to rehabilitate the dignity of the church, to defend the church against the interference of the state, to fight against rationalism.

MAJOR WRITERS OF THE AGE

Alfred Tennyson (1809-92)

Throughout the entire Victorian period Tennyson stood at the summit of poetry in England. Tennyson’s life is a remarkable one in this respect, that from beginning to end he seems to have been dominated by a single impulse, the impulse of poetry.

His work

The princess,

Dora,

The Memoriam,

Crossing the bar

Plays

Queen Mary (1875)

Harold (1876)

The falcon (1879) is a comedy based on a story from Boccaccio.

The cup (1881) is based on a story from Plutarch.

The foresters (1892), dealing with the familiar Robin Hood them was produced in America

Robert Browning (07 May 1812-12 December 1889)

He was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets. Of all the poets in our literature, no other is so completely, so consciously, so magnificently a teacher of men. He feels his mission of faith and courage in a world of doubt and timidity. He is better known today for his shorter poems such as The Pied Piper of Hamelin and How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix. By Twelve, Browning had written a book of poetry which he later destroyed when no publisher could be found. He was a great admirer of the Romantic poets, especially Shelley.

His work

Poems

Paracelsus,

Pauline,

Men &women,

The ring and the book,

The ring and the book the poem is composed of twelve books and four volumes from November 1868 through to February 1869.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (06 March 1806-29 June 1861)

Among the minor poets of the past century Elizabeth Barrett occupies perhaps the highest place in popular favour. She was one of the most prominent English poets of the Victorian era. Her poetry was widely popular in both Britain and the United States during her lifetime. Her first adult collection, The Seraphim and Other Poems was published in 1838. She wrote prolifically between 1841-1844 producing poetry. Elizabeth’s volume Poems (1844) brought her great success. During this time, she met and corresponded with the writer Robert Browning, who admired her work. She is remembered for poems like How Do I Love Thee (Sonnet 43, 1845) and Aurora Leigh (1856). She wrote her own Homeric Epic the Battle of Marathon: A Poem. Her first collection of poems, An Essay on Mind, with other poems, was published in 1826 and reflected her passion for Byron and Greek politics.

Matthew Arnold (24 December 1822-15 April 1888)

In the world of literature Arnold has occupied for many years an authoritative position as critic and teacher, similar to that held by Ruskin in the world of art. He was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. Arnold published his second volume of poems in 1852, Empedocles on Etna, and other poems. In 1853, he published poems: A New Edition, a selection from two earlier volumes famously excluding Empedocles on Etna, but adding new poems, Sohrab and Rustum and The Scholar Gipsy. In 1854, Poems: Second Series appeared; also a selection, it is included the new poem, Balder Dead. In 1867, Dover Beach depicted a nightmarish world from which the old religious verities have receded. In his poetry, he derived not only the subject matter of his narrative poems from various traditional or literary sources but even much of the romantic melancholy of his earlier poems Senancour’s Obermann. Arnold, as shown it his essay on the study of poetry regarded poetry as “a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty”.

<Dante Gabriel Rossetti (12 May 1828- 09 April 1882)

He was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood in 1848, with William Holman Hunt and john Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists an writers influenced by the movement, most notably William Morris and Edward Burne- Jones. His early poetry was influenced by John Keats. His later poetry was characterised by the complex interlinking of thought and feeling, especially in his sonnet sequence The House of Life. He frequently wrote sonnets to accompany his pictures, spanning from The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) and Astarte Syriaca (1877), while also creating art to illustrate poems such as Goblin Market by the celebrated poet Christina Rossetti, his sister. He worked on English translations of Italian poetry including Dante Alighieri’s La Vita Nuova.

Charles Dickens (1812-70)

Charles Dickens was the most influential novelist of this age. More ever he was a social reformer. Dickens is one of our greatest artists. A glance through even this unsatisfactory biography gives us certain illuminating suggestions in regard to all of Dicken’s work. First he was child, poor and lonely, longing for love and society, second he was clerk in a lawyer’s office and in the court, third he was reporter and afterwards as manager of various newspaper and fourth, he was actor, always an actor in spirit.

His work

‘The pickwick papers’

‘Oliver Twist’

‘A tale of two cities’

‘David Copperfield’

His popularity was exploited in journalism for he edited ‘the Daily News’. In 1858 Dickens commenced his famous series of ‘Public reading’. They were also given in America with the greatest success.

conclusion

This age was also a period of great scientific discovers and progress. As a conclusion we can say that The Victorian Age represents the precursor of the modern era. It was, indeed a period of great achievements in all the domains, contributing essentially to the development of the British society.
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Assingment Blog

Friday, 1 April 2016

Technoculture as risk

INTRODUCTION Literary Theory Rasa & Dhvani

Interpreting the odes of John Keats

The major writer Tennyson & Browning

Tuesday, 29 March 2016

Explain Blood Diamond and Lagaan Movies are related to postcolonialism