English Literature & Theology

The novel "Surfacing" is structured around the point of view of a young woman who travels with her boyfriend and two married friends to a remote island on a lake in Northern Quebec, where she spent much of her childhood, to search for her missing father. Accompanied by her lover and another young couple, she becomes caught up in her past and in questioning her future. This psychological mystery tale presents a compelling study of a woman who is also searching for herself. The unnamed narrator of the novel is also its chief protagonist. She is an artist who goes in search of her missing father. The novel is written entirely from the narrator’s perspective, detailing events as they occur while flashing back to events past. Atwood re-creates the narrator’s raw, unfiltered psychology by including the narrator’s observations and memories as they occur. The narrator speaks in the first person and does not address a specific audience. Her voice is objective in that it only relates w...

Life is a constant process, which cannot be stopped. We can only carry memories forward while life goes on.  In this short story, Ruskin Bond narrates his experience during one of his train journeys to Dehra as an eighteen-year-old. He tells us that he used to spend his vacation every summer in his grandmother’s place in Dehra and had to pass a small lonely station, Deoli amidst the jungle on the way. This station appears strange to him as no one got on or off the train there & nothing seemed to happen there. He wonders why the train stopped there for ten minutes regularly without reason and feels sorry for the lonely little platform.  On one such journey, the author happens to see a pale-looking girl selling baskets. She appears to be poor, but with grace and dignity. Her shiny black hair and dark, troubled eyes attracts the author. The girl offers to sell baskets to him. He initially refuses to buy and later when she insists, happens to buy one with a little hesitation, ...

  Literature and society by F R  Leavis *Literature and Society is an essay by F.R.Leavis. During the Matrixing decade, Leavis was once invited to ‘Union of the London School of Economics and Politics’ where he addressed students on discourse on Literature and Society. *Leavis showed great interest towards literature, tradition, education and society. * He was inspired by writers and poet like T.S.Eliot, D.H.Lawrence William Blake, Bunyan and others.  *As a result he has contributed many books like The Great Tradition, The Common Pursuit, New Bearings In English, Dickens the Novelist, Education and University etc. * Quotes by Leavis : "Literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness” * "Literature is the store house of the recorded values”. *The above quotes assure us the significance of literature in one’s life and it’s need. Leavis always believed that literature should be closely related to criticism of...

  Tradition and individual talent  *In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence.  *Certainly the word (tradition) is not likely to appear in our appreciations of living or dead writers. *Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius. *we only conclude (we are such unconscious people) that the French are “more critical” than we, and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were the less spontaneous. *we might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing. *We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed.   *The tradition ways of the immediate g...

  Life Melange   Morning dew on the roses  Shining like bright stars Glittering, glittering, glittering  fills whole day with zing,  Oh!  soon follows the noon  to extract the sweaty swoon  Work - work -  work - work amalgam of melancholy hark    Alas,  it's evening  Life is full of ting ting Breathing the easy breath  numbly waiting for death, Here comes the booming night  With full of suspense sight  Invoking the childish consistency  Brings the peace vehemently , And at last everything is a mystery . By Neethish Krupal 

  *Psychoanalysis is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques that deal in part with the unconscious mind, and which together form a method of treatment for mental disorders.  *The discipline was established in the early 1890s by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud, who developed the practice from his theoretical model of personality organization and development, psychoanalytic theory. *Psychoanalysis was later developed in different directions, mostly by students of Freud, such as Alfred Adler and his collaborator, Carl Gustav Jung, as well as by neo-Freudian thinkers, such as Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Harry Stack Sullivan. *Psychoanalysis is a controversial discipline, and its effectiveness as a treatment has been contested.  *Psychoanalytic concepts are also widely used outside the therapeutic arena, in areas such as psychoanalytic literary criticism, as well as in the analysis of film, fairy tales, philosophical perspectives as Freudo-Marxism and other cultura...

  *New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object.  *The work of Cambridge scholar I. A. Richards, especially his Practical Criticism and The Meaning of Meaning, which offered what was claimed to be an empirical scientific approach, were important to the development of New Critical methodology. *Also very influential were the critical essays of T. S. Eliot, such as "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and "Hamlet and His Problems", in which Eliot developed his notions of the "theory of impersonality" and "objective correlative" respectively.  Eliot's evaluative judgments, such as his condemnation of Milton and Dryden, his liking for the so-called metaphysical poets, and his insistence that poe...

  *Russian formalism was a school of literary criticism in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. *It includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars such as Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Vladimir Propp, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Boris Tomashevsky, Grigory Gukovsky . *These people revolutionised literary criticism between 1914 and the 1930s by establishing the specificity and autonomy of poetic language and literature. *It developed in the structuralist and post-structuralist periods. Under Stalin it became a pejorative term for elitist art. *Russian formalism was a diverse movement, producing no unified doctrine, and no consensus amongst its proponents on a central aim to their endeavours. *"Russian Formalism" describes two distinct movements: the OPOJAZ (Obshchestvo Izucheniia Poeticheskogo Yazyka, Society for the Study of Poetic Language) in St. Petersburg and the Moscow Linguistic Circle. Therefore, it is more precise to refer to th...

  Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of a Human Science‟ was a lecture presented at a conference titled “The Language of Criticism and the Science of Man” held at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA in 1966, which was published in 1967.   Derrida begins his text with a reference to a recent event in the history of the concept of structure. He is concerned that the word “event” is too loaded with meaning. He calls the history of the concept of structure as "event".  The event evolves changes in structuralism, precisely in structure and the structurality of structure. Derrida is concerned that the word event is also loaded with meaning. This event is now identified as rapture and redoubling.  It is believed that every event of the history consists structure and the structure has center. The function of the center is not orient, balance and organize the structure , but also to resist the doubts raised by the orienting and organized coherence of the system...

 Mr. DOUGLASS has very properly chosen to write his own Narrative, in his own style, His narrative covers a time period of about 30 years from his birth in 1818 to the publication of his narrative in 1845 and spans across Maryland, New York, and Massachusetts . He was born in Talbot County, Maryland, in 1818, to a slave, Harriet Bailey, and thus became the property of the slave owner Anthony. His father was a white man, but he never knew who he was. His birth name was Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, but he later changed his name to Frederick Douglass. He was taken away from his mother when he was a baby, as was the “common custom” at that time, “to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child.”  Frederick Douglass was self-educated and wrote his autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass to expose the atrocities of slavery and according to the best of his ability, rather than to employ some one else. It is, therefore, entirely his ow...

  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is a novel by American author Mark Twain, which was first published in the United Kingdom in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885. It is told in the first person by Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, Anti-slavery is one of the central aspects of Mark Twain’s iconic novel, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Twain’s thoughts and beliefs regarding slavery channeled through the book’s main characters were quite revolutionary and ahead of their time.  As one of the main themes of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain made his feelings of disgust about slavery clearly understood. Twain believed that slavery and religion were tied together in ways that made the abolition of slavery a difficult task.  Mark Twain grew up in Missouri, which was a slave state during his childhood. He would later incorporate his formative experiences of the institution of slavery into his writings. Though Huck Finn is the main character in the no...

   Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert is an enduring work of realism that uses sophisticated narrative techniques and complex characterization to accurately depict a nuanced portrayal of provincial bourgeois life in 19th century Europe. Flaubert said, "I want to write a novel about nothing." Instead he created a masterpiece, combining a finely tuned realism with an ironic portrait of romanticism. Madame Bovary delves into the intricacies of bourgeois life, a subject matter that is often found in the literature of realism. Emma’s disappointments stem in great part from her dissatisfaction with the world of the French bourgeoisie. She aspires to be part of the aristocracy. the novel embraces ‘human’ themes such as love, destroyed illusions, the boredom of provincial life and adultery. This might seem unlikely, not least because the story of a bored French housewife seduced into conspicuous consumption and extramarital affairs by unrealistic expectations of love, romance and purc...

  Rasa is the key word to Sanskrit literary criticism. Rasa is the essence of art and literature and it is the interconnecting link between all arts. All the Sanskrit aestheticians have acknowledged the significance of the theory of Rasa in the appreciation of natya (drama) and kavya (poetry). In his Natyashastra, the first available source of literary criticism in Sanskrit. In Sanskrit this literally means ‘juice’, ‘extract of a fruit’ or ‘essence’ and refers to the finest qualities of taste. This goes back millions of years to the evolution of our senses as ways to detect what is good or bad for us. The colour, taste and smell of food, can usually tell us whether or not it is safe to eat it. It is therefore logical that an aesthetic theory would begin with an understanding of qualities linked to the testing of food. Rasa in an aesthetic sense is suggested in the Vedic literature, but the oldest surviving manuscripts, with the rasa theory of Hinduism, are of Natya Shastra.There wa...

 Oedipus Rex is widely regarded as one of the greatest plays, stories, and tragedies ever written by Sophocles.  Power corrupts human. Power both corrupts and metaphorically blinds characters in the play,  Oedipus the King. As a ruler, Oedipus is arrogant, unperceptive, and downright, mean to people around him.  Throughout the play , Oedipus assumes that the other characters are trying to steal his power, hence Oedipus doesn't listen to their wisdom and rather he ignores the warnings. The play, Oedipus Rex, shows this pride of power through the character of Oedipus.  Oedipus says - "I will do everything in my power to heal this murderous wound. With Apollo’s help, either we win or we die" One can say that this irrational behaviour—his hamartia, as Aristotle puts it—is due to the repression of a whole series of thoughts in his consciousness, in fact everything that referred to his earlier doubts about his parentage. His words express power over people and God lik...

 The novel,  'City of Joy' is a 1985 novel by Dominique Lapierre. Calcutta is nicknamed "the City of Joy" after this novel, although the slum was based on an area in its twin city of Howrah. The author has stated that the stories of the characters in the book are true and he uses many real names in his book. However, the book is considered fictional since many conversations and actions are assumed or created.  The book told about the story of epic in a place called Anand Nagar or City of Joy. The novel concerns men, women and children who have been uprooted from their homes by implacable nature and hostile circumstances, and thrown into a city whose capacity for hospitality has been pushed beyond imagining.  This is a story about how people learn, despite incredibly difficult odds, to survive, to share and to love. Besides Hasari Pal and Brother Stephan Kovalski, and Max a doctor from America, are the main characters of the novel.  Father Stephan Kovalski a Poli...

Structuralism is  a method of interpretation and analysis of aspects of human cognition, behaviour, culture, and experience, which focuses on relationships of contrast between elements in a conceptual system. Structuralism, in a broader sense, is a way of perceiving the world in terms of structures. Structures are defined as the patterns and forms of social relations and combinations among a set of constituent social elements or component parts such as positions, units, levels, regions and locations, and social formations. Based primarily on the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, structuralism considered language as a system of signs and signification, the elements of which are understandable only in relation to each other and to the system. According to him, language is not a naming process by which things get associated with a word or name. Because different languages have different words to refer to the same objects or concepts, there is no intrinsic reason why a spec...

 The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales is an estates satire. Medieval society was divided into three estates: the Church (those who prayed), the Nobility (those who fought), and the Peasantry (those who worked).  In the late fourteenth century, a moral decline in the habits of the religious and the deterioration of religious exercises was causing great concern. In the Host’s portraits of the pilgrims, the narrator sets out the functions of each estate and satirizes the members of the different estates illegal actions  and behavior – particularly those of the Church – fail to meet their duties.  Religion is the center of the Canterbury tales as we learn that these characters are all making a holy pilgrimage to the church at Canterbury, a popular religious destination after Thomas Beckett, a priest, who was murdered inside the church and proclaimed a saint. The prologue to Canterbury Tales provides a window into the debasement of Christianity under the Catholic ...