English Literature & Theology

  Apologizing An apology is something that you say or write in order to tell someone that you are sorry that you have hurt them or caused trouble for them. Part 1) Knowing how to accept an apology in writing is helpful in both professional and personal situations.   Read or listen to the apology calmly and carefully. Withhold any immediate reaction until you are able to calmly reflect on what the person has. Listen or read with an open mind and be willing to entertain the other person’s perspective. Tell the person you appreciate their apology, but you need some time to process it.   Take some time to calm yourself down before trying to assess the apology. Try deep breathing to regain your composure. Whether you are receiving an apology from a friend or family member, or someone you work with, it’s important to give the apology your full consideration. If the person has written you an apology letter, find a quiet place where you can focus on reading the apology without di...

  Accepting praises & criticism  Praise  : When you get or provide positive feedback on the spot, the other person is clear about what they did that you liked. Criticism : is a form of feedback. It provides a space to evaluate past performance, highlight areas for improvement, and identify possible solutions. All of which are vital stepping stones on the path to success.   Accepting compliments : When someone says something nice about you simply say thanks in an accepting and grateful way. You can also ask what they liked about your work. You can agree on something in what they said about your work. Positive assertion and positive enquiry are simple techniques for handling praise and compliments How to gracefully accept criticism ?   1. Pause before reacting When you're given criticism, the first thing you should do is pause. Pausing for a brief moment can help you process what you are being told and allows you to prevent any re...

  Consultation & solution of problems         Problem solving is at the root of what management consultants do. Clients hire consultants to help overcome or eliminate obstacles to the clients’ goals – that is, to solve problems. Necessary steps to solve a problem :         Identify the Problem       This may seem self-explanatory, but this step is more involved than it appears at first glance. Problems are often like icebergs – only a small fraction shows above the surface. Identifying the problem involves a careful definition of just what the nature of the problem is. This is crucial, because it will also define how the problem can/must be solved.          Structure the Problem          This means taking a deep dive into the problem to understand what, exactly, is going wrong and why. Structuring the problem begins with careful observation, inspection, fact-gathering, and...

  Giving information : about various facilities, distance , area, local specialities Information-giving is a means of communication that should not be confused with ‘giving advice’. Information-giving can provide an individual with strategies that enable them to address their problems. Information-giving promotes choice, rather than being dictatorial and over-authoritarian.  Instructions are essential when we are required to do tasks which aren’t familiar or we are doing it for the first time,(there are various ways of giving instructions) we use the imperative form while giving orders, 8 commands, advice and warnings. Instructions must be kept as simple as possible, and they must be logical. Instructions and directions are used by people in everyday situations. People exchange information through instruction and directions. Instructions and directions can be oral or written. Both act as providing guideli...

    Dealing with complaints        It is an employer’s duty to make staff feel comfortable enough to openly discuss their problems and feel that they will be taken seriously. A thorough procedure should be implemented to ensure all complaints are addressed properly and completely. This may include supervisors or team leaders initially investigating the problems as standard procedure.   Procedure 1: REVIEW   Review the complaint as quickly as possible, make sure you fully understand the complaint and clarify the problem with the employee.  Make sure the complaint is documented in writing identifying areas for concern and any witnesses.   Procedure  2: GRIEVANCE PROCEDURE   Follow  the grievance procedure as per the company law, start by asking the complainant to make their supervisor aware of this issue and try and solve the problem informally with them if you feel this is appropriate. Procedure 3: FORM...

  (Unit :1)      (1) Greeting & Welcoming ) Greeting and welcoming is a way of starting conversation and breaking down barriers established by the unknown, and an opportunity to connect with people that can bring about great results and create a personal bond.  A good welcome sets the tone for your guest’s entire stay. It’s one of the most important parts of creating a positive guest experience.  First impressions can make or break a guest’s experience, and the way in which you are greeting guests is very important as it's the first point of onsite contact.   A fantastic greeting could:  Establish good rapport with the guest Set expectations Build trust and loyalty Ensure the guest has everything they need throughout their stay   Required skills for an effective greeting and welcoming  1) Establish eye contact   One of the first and arguably most important practices in greeting guests is establishing eye contact. This form of ...

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...