English Literature & Theology

  *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 ...

 John Donne's "Death, be not proud," or Holy Sonnet 10, is a poem written in the form of an Italian sonnet. It is narrated in the first person. The narrator directly addresses Death, a figure personified to a proud man in the poem. The concept of eternity is mentioned in the poem's last two lines. The key to understanding the meaning of eternity in this poem is to know that Donne, born into a Roman Catholic family, converted to Anglicanism and was, in 1615, ordained as a priest in the Church of England. This means he is writing not just as a Christian, but as a theologically knowledgeable cleric, and distinguished preacher whose sermons are still widely read.  The poem is an example of apostrophe, addressing Death (personified) as a living being who is thus listening to the speaker. This intentionally removes the mystery or sense of superiority in the concept of death, making it seem as though death can be easily defeated. John Donne doesn't really address the ide...

 Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey was an English nobleman, politician and poet. Henry took the courtesy title of Earl of Surrey in 1524 when his father succeeded as 3rd Duke of Norfolk. He was a great poet and credited as being one of the founders of English Renaissance poetry. With Sir Thomas Wyatt ,Henry Howard  introduced into England the styles and metres of the Italian humanist poets and so laid the foundation of a great age of English poetry. Earl of Surrey's sonnet "Love that doth reign and live within my thought" is a translation of Petrarch's sonnet  Surrey's translation uses several Petrarchan images that became fashionable in poetic representations of love. The simile of "love as a battlefield," is central to Petrarchanism. Surrey's translation puts a greater emphasis on Love as martial conqueror.  Love is personified and made human, a character in the poem. This is used to show the conflict that love creates within the speaker. Love is the mo...

  Ernesto "Che" Guevara was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist. A major figure of the Cuban Revolution.  Guevara’s life continues to be a subject of great public interest and been explored and portrayed in numerous books and films, including The Motorcycle Diaries  Motorcycle Diaries is, as its title suggests, a record of a motorcycle journey, based on a diary by its author – a young Argentinian medical student – kept during the trip. What makes it remarkable isthat the young medical student who wrote it was Ernesto “Che” Guevara de la Serna, now known as a leader of the Cuban revolution, a guerrilla strategist, a Cuban government official, and a fomenter of revolution in the Congo and Bolivia. Guevara was born into a middle-class family on June 14, 1928, in Rosario, Argentina. He was plagued by asthma in his youth but still managed to distinguish himself as an athlete. He absorbed the left-leaning poli...

  Salman Rushdie's first non fictional book and a journalistic account was written in 1987, and as a glimpse at that particular moment of time,  this book is very effective.   Rusdie’s trip of three weeks was made at the invitation of the Sandinista Association of Cultural workers and he was there at the seven year anniversary of the Sandinista’s rise to power. Rushdie sees a certain righteousness in the Sandanista movement, but warns that with power comes certain temptations, and admits that the leaders he met with were questionably equipped to deal with those temptations.  The Jaguar's Smile, the title of which comes from a famous Nicaraguan poem,  'Limerick' in which a little girl wearing a smile rides away on a jaguar. When she returns, the girl is gone, and now the jaguar is wearing the smile. Far from being propaganda, Rushdie awknowledges with his title that the politics of Nicaragua are dangerous and ambiguous. History would show that neither the Sa...

 Congreve’s plays belong to a genre known as Restoration comedy. The Restoration refers to the reestablishment of the monarchy in England with the return of Charles II to the throne in 1660 after a period of social upheaval. In English literature, the Restoration “age” parallels the political period, covering roughly the years from 1660 to the revolution in 1688 when Parliament regained power.  The genre is characterized by its satirical view of the times, with its particular focus on the relationship between conventional morality and the individual spirit. Its comic characters are often reflections of the shallow aristocrats of court society; they are peopled with libertines and wits, gallants and dandies.  In 'The Way of the World Congreve has presented the true picture of the contemporary society. Here he has described the infidelity of married women, the fashionable life of ladies and gentleman and the intrigues of lovers.  All the characters of this play are fon...

 Alexander Pope  was a poet and satirist of the Augustan period and one of its greatest artistic exponents. He is considered the foremost English poet of the early 18th century and a master of the heroic couplet. The poem is perhaps the most outstanding example in the English language of the genre of mock-epic. The epic had long been considered one of the most serious ofliterary forms; it had been applied, in the classical period, to the lofty subjectmatter of love and war, and the Christian faith. In his mock epic The Rape of the Lock, Alexander Pope focuses on several major themes. The primary theme is the emptiness and frivolity of courtly, upper-class life, which Pope satirizes hilariously. The whole poem centers around a single lock of hair that has been clipped by the Baron from the nape of Belinda's neck. The Rape of the Lock is a humorous indictment of the vanities and idleness of18th-century high society. Basing his poem on a real incident among families of his acquai...

 Sir Roger has been characterized vividly by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Sir Roger is presented in these essays as kind, generous, lovable, and sometimes as a peculiar person. But in the hand of Joseph Addison, Sir Roger’s character is conveyed ironically. For that reason, he sometimes seems odd. Although he is gentle and mild and lovable to people, he has some eccentricities and oddities. And all these things are delineated superbly in these essays. Joseph Addison’s essay Sir Roger at Church is about a unique individual named Roger. Addison begins the essay by saying that the observance of Sunday as a holy day keeps mankind civilised and polished. On Sundays people are at their very best. They appear clean and talk to other people on boring topics. Just like a merchant discusses exchange rates, the Parish people discuss the affairs of the parish. The Spectator links this ancient wisdom to Sir Roger de Coverley’s sensible and honorable dealings with his servants, which, in t...