Wednesday 28 October 2015

Paper 1. Renaissance Literature.

Roll No:-29
Topic:-The tragic theology of Dr.Faustus.
Paper:-1
M.A sem-1
M.K. Bhavnagar University.
     Dr.Faustus was written as a time of religious conflate and controversy in England Marlowe, trough his work as a government agent was well acquainted with the nature of the conflict. The main anxiety was that after the reformation of the English church under Henry His eldest daughter’s brief return to Catholicism and the consolidation of Protestantism in the long reign of Elizabeth.
   The play is full of references to grace and damnation .Faustus practice of black magic and his pact with Maphistophilis, the agent of God’s enemy Satan condemns him to damonation and eternal punishment in hell. The conflict between good and evil and the God and Devil lies at the heart of the play and the battleground is Faustus soul.
      Faustus ‘s play is tragedy in Christian term because he gives into temptation and is damned to hell .His principal sin in his great pride and ambition which Christian virtue of humility by letting this traits rule his life, Faustus allows his soul to be claimed by Christian cosmologies prince of devils Lucifer. Faustus struggles endlessly against his unknowing, the struggle which indicates nothing but the incompleteness that makes existence tragic.
In marlowe’s play as in his source,the hero’s blasphemous choice of black magic is a splendid beginning his final moments of dread and despair are a powerful conclusion .But between these two plots of spirituals crisis falls on the astonishing adventures in sorcery which can be for more easily talked about sustain the essential drama of the hero’s progress towards damnation.
     The opening scene shows Faustus struggling to know what it cannot will kinds of knowledge .He is acting on a decision he has long considered his mood abruptly shifts on theology and its central teaching “We must die on everlasting death”, followed by a sudden feeling of discouragement .The inevitability of death is not banished with confidence and that’s why he turns to magic.
In this play as in Greek mythology, man’s primal disobedience is a promethean impulse .It is the questioning mind, not unruly passion that threatens the divinely established order for with knowledge enough man .Even aods.
      The very desire to fathom supernal masteries becomes ,in Christian apologetics , a symptom answer to a job is ad hominems in the largest sense what right has man to question, the argument of ‘Paradise Lost’ is similarly ad homonem Milton does not realize the edict against tasting moral knowledge. He insists rather that the edict is one which only the egotistical , undisciplined or self conceited would wish to over step .In fact the limitations seems arbitrary by Satan or make a God of their own appetites.
        In Dr.Faustus he anatomizes the vice, he would be super man who spurns splendid accomplishments because they do not satisfy on ignoble egotism .Faustus practice medicine without compassion for human suffering ,and worse still he would abandon his studies because his fame is already established and the conquest of death eludes him .He  despises the petty quiddities of the law but he is not inspired by a nobler ideal of justice.
      Faustus’s tragic career is more paradoxical because even as his grand illusions fade and his intellectual dissipate in petty shows and sensuality, his moral awareness grows .By strict Christiansen, Faustus may be more innocent at the beginning of the play than at the close to an audience, however he is most arrogant most contemptuous of other men .Most scornful of religion before he falls .His fall is a moral education and discovery during which he is humanized not degraded.
          Faustus claims that his doom was sold by his blasphemous defiance of God. Theology denies his claim on the ground that no trespass has irrevocable consequences and no human act is beyond divine pardon.Yet even theology admits that were irrevocably changed. Knowing good and evil he forfeited the paradise of innocence and entered the world of moral and mortal experience from which only grace might redeem him.
      Grace is grace, say the reprobates Measure for Measure despite all controversy .But grace in Dr.Faustus is problematical because Marlowe would have it so. He could have shown in the last scene a Faustus who  is tormented by the legions and the prospect of hell as he reaches toward a glorious heaven beyond his grasp .Marlowe chose instead to make Lucifer merely a spectator to the final agony of his victim, who shrinks more from the wrath  God than from the terror of hell .Mephistopheles may define hell as the absence of God, but Faustus finds the presence of God unbearable because he sees not the loving father but the wrathful Jehovah who cast the rebellious angels down to hell.
        In Dr.Faustus his quarrel with Christianity continues .The church is still for him a place of superstitious of the divine is the universe itself in which God’s apollonian creativity is manifest. Marlowe could imagine his heroic creator exacting a fearful sacrifice as the prince of man’s pardon .But he could not imagine nor does he imply in Dr.Faustus that is supreme and universal power ever assumed man’s inferior shape weakness and morality.
      Marlowe shows Renaissance spirit ideas in his Dr.Faustus. His enthusiasm liberty and trust of knowledge are also representation of contemporary era. Dr.Faustus is though Christian play, but it represents Marlowe’s atheism towards Christianity and its beliefs. Robert Ornstein also presents it very beautifully and philosophically in his essay to convince us easily. Dr.Faustus as cosmic tragedy, it is necessary to relate its particular view of Man and God to other works of Marlowe and to the athletic doctrines attributed to him by his contemporaries.
           Dr.Faustus as an orthodox homily is tragic grandeur and metaphysical terror to view it however as  Marlowe’s ultimate religious and cosmological statement as his turning upon his ideal of transcendence is to grasp the full meaning of Faustus despair and to grasp also the final congruence of Marlowe’s art and life.
             “Bell, Book and candle” as a parody of Catholicism. is also one of Faustus’s own condition of being caught in endless loop of his thoughts. His interactions with the devils re-enacts pattern of avoidance that Luther call the fundamental condition of morality. The pact is an emblem of human state either coming from studies of divinity or concourse with devils.

             Thus, Dr.Faustus has element of Christian morality. It creates some question in our mind about Christian superstitions and Marlowe’s intentions. But Dr.Faustus can truly present Marlowe’s atheism nihilism and internal struggle of Christian and its God. And also it take place in an explicitly Christian cosmos God sides on high as the judge of world and every soul goes either to hell or to heaven.

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Monday 26 October 2015

Dryden's view on shakespeare and Ben Jonson with critical comments

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Name- Riva M Pandya
Roll number- 29
 Topic- Dryden’s view on Shakespeare and Ben Jonson with critical comments.
  Paper- 3
     Sem-1
         John Dryden  was  re recognized  as the  greatest poet of his day and his all  for  love  based on Antony and   Cleopatra Is  In fact an  Original  work  enjoy it  is relationship to  the earlier  play  is forgotten.    he was not only  a  playwright  and  poet as   critic  He is still read  With respect partly  because of his critical Insights  partly because  in any way Summarized best attitude of time.

      Dryden was very well known critic in his time view on many writer like,      Ben Johnson, Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher and many other writers.  In an essay of dramatic poesy, he give new concept PR and Ben Johnson give good and bad side of the writers writing   an essay of dramatic poesy.

In1668 he wrote his important prose work of “Dramatic poesy an essay.” Dryden’s own defense of his literary practices.  The four gentlemen, Eugenius, Crites, Lisideius and Neander begin an ironic and witty conversation on the subject of Poetry which soon turns into a debate on the virtue of modern and ancient writers.

Restoration gravity John Dryden in his essay of dramatic poesy explains the favorable public response to plays by citing their Universal appeal.
         in   an essay of dramatic poesy  comment on some writers specially  Shakespeare Johnson Beaumont  especially being so accurate a judge of plays that Ben Johnson while he liv’d submitted all his writing to his censure the first   play   which brought Fletcher and him in esteem  was  their pilaster  four  before that ,they had written two or three  very unsuccessfully  as the like is reported of  Ben Johnson. He rewrites every man in his humor pepper square drilling more regular than Shakespeare’s.

        Dryden’s comparative criticism of Shakespeare:-
                 Android  to  John Dryden Shakespeare  the main who all modern and perhaps ancient poets of the largest and most  comprehensive .in his own time  William Shakespeare was rated as  merely one among  many talented   playwright and poets but since  the last 17 century  he has been considered impaired of the English language .

          No other dramatist has been performed even remotely as often on the world stage as Shakespeare. in his remark on Shakespeare , Dryden ceases to be a classicist and goes over to the other camp of the romantics. His appreciation of the comprehensive soul of Shakespeare is a tribute to his own comprehensive soul and imaginative sensibility.
         He writes:”To begin then with Shakespeare, he was the man who of all moderns and perhaps poets had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily when he describes anything you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning give him the greater commendation, he was naturally learned, he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature he looked inwards and found her there. I cannot where alike i were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat insipid, his comic wit degenerating into clenches: his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great when some great occasion is presented to him no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit and did not raise himself as high above the rest of the poets.”
                 Some of Dryden’s comments are repeated from earlier writers notably the assurance that Shakespeare's  art was natural ,this time used almost as an excuse to justify the awkward fact that he did not follow the classical rules as carefully as Jonson. He did not pull his punches when it came to describing what as Shakespeare’s faults. He found Shakespeare’s plots absurdly loose in construction and deplored bombast of his passionate speeches destiny and imaginary was not admired.
                He is the very Janus of poets he wears almost every where two faces and you have scarce begun to one even you despise the other. He shows love, passion and present situation in his work. Dryden say that Shakespeare is far above him he was quite conscious of both the weakness and greatness of Shakespeare.
                             
                Dryden’s comparative criticism of Ben Jonson:-
                      Ben Jonson is among the best known writers and theorists of English renaissance literature, second in reputation only to Shakespeare. A prolific   dramatist and a man of letters highly learned in the classics, he profoundly influenced Augustan age through his emphasis on the precepts of Horace, Aristotle and other classical Greek and Latin thinkers.
                        He was master of mankind love in any of his scenes. His genius was too serious to do it gracefully; he was deeply conversant in the ancient, Greek and Latin. Some time he translated word to word from ancient. Dryden remarks on Ben Jonson who is compared with Shakespeare and in this way the respective merits of the two are brought out.
     “As for Jonson, to whose character I am now arrived if we look upon him while he was himself (For his last plays were but his dotages) I think him the most learned and judicious writer which any theater ever had. He was a most severe judge of himself as well as others. In his work you find little to retrench or alter.wit and language and humor also in some measure we had before him I but sometime, something drama was waiting till he came .He managed his strength to more advantage then any who preceded him .You seldom find him making love in any of his genius was too sullen and saturnine to do it gracefully especially when he knew he came after those who performed both of such a height”.
           “Humor was his proper sphere and in that he delighted most to represent Mechanic people. He invades authors like a monarch and what would be theft in other poets is only victory in him .His fault in his language in his play he did a little to much to Romanize our tongue .Leaving the word which he translated almost as much Latin as he found them, Wherein though he learnedly followed the Idiom of their language he did not enough comply with ours” .Ben Jonson has done robberies so openly authors like a monarch he was represent old Rome to us.
           
         Thus to conclude of him as he has given us the most correct players so in the precepts which he has laid down in his discoveries we have as many and profitable rules for  prefacing the stage as anywhere which the French can furnish us.
               Thus, Dryden say ,”I must acknowledge him the more correct poet but Shakespeare the greatest wit he was the homer or father of our dramatic poet, Jonson was virgil, the pardner of elaborate writing ,I admire him but I love Shakespeare.”
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Theme motif and symbol of Gulliver Travels

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Name-Riva M Pandya
RollNo-29
Topic-Theme, Motif and Symbol of Gulliver Travels
Sem-1
Year-2015-2016
Paper-2
M.K.  Bhavnagar University.
          Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver Travels” published in 1726, is satire disguised as a fantastic novel, with each journey of the redoubtable Lemuel Gulliver delivering him to a different country race and culture. Swift uses each country to satirize some aspect of politics, religion or human nature. The theme in the first science- fiction -voyage tale is that no human is beyond corruption.
Theme of Gulliver Travels:-
      Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
           Might versus Right:
              Gulliver Travels implicitly asks whether social life should be governed by physical power or moral right. Gulliver experiences the advantages of physical might in Lilliput and the disadvantages as a miniature visitor to Brobdingnag. He is physically tied down by the Lilliputians and kept in a cage in Brobdingnag. He also observes physical force used against others, as with the changing of the Yahoos by the Houyhnhnms.
  The age controversy between Lilliput and Blefuscu is a moral question related to the correct interpretation of their holy book. This differences of opinion justifies, in their eyes the war it has caused similarly the use of physical force against the Yahoos is justified for the Houyhnhnms by their sense of moral right are often just as arbitrary as physical subjugation. The Laputans control the land of Balnibarbi through force because they believe themselves more rational even though we might see them as absurd.
    The Individual versus Society:
The ideal of a utopia goes back to Plato’s republic a city state governed by the wise and is expressed most famously in English by Thomas Mores’ Utopia .Swift’s attitude towards Utopia is more skeptical and he underlines the tendency to privilege the collective group over the individual .The children of Plato’s republic are raised communally without knowing their biological parents because this system enhance social justice.
The Houyhnhnms also enforce family planning dictating that the parents of two females must exchange a child with the parents of two males so that the male to female ratio is they come closer to the Utopians ideal than the Lilliputians but there is something unsetting about the Houyhnhnms indistinct personalities and lack of names. So Gulliver never complains about feeling lonely but the embittered and antisocial misanthrope we see at the end of the novel is clearly a profoundly isolated individual.
The limits of Human understanding:
The ideal that all human understanding has natural limits is important in Gulliver Travels. Swifts attacks theoretical knowledge his portrait of the self centered Laputas, who show open contempt for those not absorbed in private theorizing is a satire against people who value knowledge above all else.
Swift insists that there is a realm of understanding into which humans are simply not supposed to venture. The Brabdingnagian  king was knows shocking little about the abstractions  of political science yet his country seems  prosperous and well governed similarly the Houyhnhnms knows little about arcane subject like astronomy though they know how long a month is by observing .
Truth and Deception:
Truth and Deception are most prominent themes in this novel. For one thing, the reader is constantly questioning whether or not Gulliver is a reliable narrator. Simply because what he is conveying is so fantastic.
Lying does appear with his journey in Lilliput. He learns that for the Lilliputians lying is a capital punishment and is considered worse than stealing in country of the Houyhnhnms Gulliver is surprised to learn that Houyhnhnms have no concept of what it means lie.
Motif of Gulliver Travels:
Excrement:
While it seems a trivial or laughable motif the recurrent mention of excrement in Gulliver’s Travels actually has a serious philosophical significance in the narrative. It symbolizes everything that is crass and ignoble about the human body and about existence in general and it obstructs any attempt to view humans as wholly spiritual or mentally transcendent creatures. Since the enlightenment culture of eighteen century England tended to view humans optimistically as noble souls rather than vulgar bodies Swift’s emphasis on the common filth of life is a slap in the face of the philosopher of his day. Swift suggest that the human condition in general is dirtier and lowlier than we might like to believe it is.
Foreign Languages:
Gulliver appears to be a gifted linguist knowing at least the basics of several European languages and even a fair amount of ancient Greek. This knowledge serves him well, as he is able to disguise himself as a Dutchman in order to facilitate his entry into Japan which at the time only admitted the Dutch. But even more important, his linguistic gifts allow him to learn the languages of the exotic lands he visits with a dazzling speed and thus gain access to their culture quickly. He learns the languages of the Lilliputians, the Brobdingnagians, and even the neighing tongue of the Houyhnhnms.
Clothing:
Critics have noted the extraordinary attention that the Gulliver pays to clothes throughout his journey. Every time he rip in his shirt or is forced to adopt some native garments to replace one of his own , he recounts the clothing details with great precision. We are told how his pants are falling apart in Lilliput, so that land are as the army marches between his legs they get quite an eyeful .We sense that Gulliver may well never fully reintegrate into European society. But the motif clothing carries a deeper more psychologically complex meaning as well. The state of nudity may remind Gulliver of how nonexistent he feels without the reassuring cover of clothing.
            The Symbols of the novel:
Lilliputians-
            The Lilliputians symbolizes wildly excessive pride in its own puny existence. Gulliver is a naïve consumer of the Lilliputians grandiose imaginings: He is by the attention of their royal family and cowed by their threats of punishment forgetting that have no real physical power over him. Their formally worded condemnation of Gulliver on grounds of treason is a model of pompous and self important verbiage but works quite effectively on the naïve Gulliver .In all, the Lilliputians symbolize misplaced human pride and point out Gulliver’s inability to diagnose it correctly.
      Brobdingnagians-
The Brobdingnagians symbolize the private and physical side of humans when examined up close and in great detail. Gulliver is forced to pay attention to such things. He is forced take the domestic sphere seriously as well. In Brobdingnag he is treated as a doll or a plaything, and thus is made privy to the urination of housemaids and the sexual lives of women. It symbolizes a dimension of human existence visible at close range under close scrutiny.
Laputans-
The Laputans represent the folly of theoretical knowledge that has no relation to human life and no use in the actual world. Laputa symbolizes the absurdity of knowledge that had been tested or applied the ludicrous side of enlightenment intellectualism .Even up above the pursuit of theoretical understanding has not improved the lot of the Laputans. It do not symbolize reasons itself but rather than pursuit of a form of knowledge that related to the improvement of human life.
Houyhnhnms-
The Houyhnhnms represent an ideal existence, a life governed by sense and moderation of which philosophers since Plato have long dreamed. As in Plato’s ideal community the Houyhnhnms have neither need to lie nor any word for lying. They do not use force but only strong exhortation.The Houyhnhnms seem like model citizens, and Gulliver’s intense grief when he is forced to leave them suggests that they have made an impact on him greater than that of any other society he has visited.
England-
England is passed over very quickly in the first paragraph behind. Gulliver seems to have very few nationalistic or patriotic feelings about England, and he rarely mentioned his homeland on his travels. The end of the fourth journey England is brought more explicitly into the fabric of Gulliver Travels When Gulliver in his neurotic state starts confusing Houyhnhnms land with his homeland referring to Englishmen as Yahoos. The possibility thus arises that all the races Gulliver encounters could be version of the English and that his travels merely allow him to see various aspects of human nature more clearly.

Role of women in Kanthapura.

Year: 2015
Roll No. 29 / Paper-4
Sub. : Role of Women in Kanthapura

                   Rao’s Kanthapura is a subtle study of the immense change that the gandhian movement of the thirties brought into the life of the Indian woman and yet didn’t let her cross the conventions to so-called feminine boundaries. The novel traces the psychologically revolution that accompanied the emergence of the woman from within the twin incarnations of the devil and the dasi that has reioned the imagination of the patriarchy since age.
                   Raols Selection of old grand mother as the narrator in one of the finest stylistic devine of the novel and also the influence of moorthys preaching and Rangmal’s sevika sangha. This is one of the rare instances where history is looked at from a woman’s point of view as opposed to its analytical, power – structured male version that ineritably leaves the women folk out.
                   In kanthapura women made up a significant part of the satygrahis and many assumed the role of leadersa in the movement thus we find Gandhi of Kanthapura. Moorthy selecting Rangmma as one of the members of the congress panchayat committee saying “We need a woman for the committee for the congress is for the weak and the lowly.”
                   Rangmma acts as a source of information, knowledge and inspiration to the village women. Rangmma was also one of the strongest woman and she is a widow. She tells women about laxmibai and trains them to resist the lathi blows of the core religious zeal in the women and adds a nationalist dimension to it “We shall fight the police for kenchamma’s sake, and if the rapture of devotion is in you, the lathi will grow as soft as butter and as supple as a silken threw and you will hymn out the name the mahatma”
                   Ken chamma was the godess. She was the center of the village. The attachments and love for the mother is express in many ways. Motherhood is represented by Kenchamma she protects from sickness diseases.
                   On the other side Rattan takes lead among women she was daughter of old widover Kamalamma. Ratan was a Child widow who has been powerfully influenced by modern ideas and who does not regard being a woman as a matter of shame and inferiority.  She is detested by the village women along with the evil Bhutan, for walking about the streets like a boy, wearing her hair to the left “like a concubine” and wearing he jeweler and all this being a widow. Rattan’s retort when accosted for this is remarkable.
                   “When she was asked why she behaved as though she hadn’t lost her husband, she said that, that was nobody’s business, and that if these sniffing old country hens thought that seeing a man for a day and this when one is ten years a marriage, they had better eat ud and drown themselves in the river” she least the women against the police as the latter launch a violent assault against the village.”
                   Rangmma also plays a vital role in resisting orthodoxy. The breath of orthodoxy found in kanthapura. Is caused more by women than men. Rangmma has a fair knowledge of puranas which her fathers Ramakrishna needs. She is also endowed with modern scientific spirit and knows about evolution of life etc. she praises noorthy as true gandhian and helps him way relentless fight aginst redmen.
                   Achakka the old woman and narrator in kanthapura. She is representative of how Indians of the time were form between accepting reality as is was or reinvisioning it as it can or as it should be. She is also representative of had “Women despite being mired in traditional ways. Can embrace change and be an active agent of reconstructing reality. She represents the fundamental force of both social and cultural changes within Kanthapura, and India in general she ends up buying into morty’s and by extension Gandhi’s call for self-rule.
                   Women in raja rao’s Kantjhapuira within the socio Political realms played women in the Indian fights for independence against British rules. In our society women one were always marginalize, in fiction but Raja portray eyed women as heroic figure in Kanthapura.
                   Even there are the women like a Akaka and Javni becomes vidow at the young age remains dependent and bur ten for family in fact her death does not perture but relieves the other. Gandhian moment had a considerable role to play vital role in bringing the women out pardah. To remove the ignorance of the women in Kanthapura.

                   Women taking part in the national movement in kanthapura it is with the help of women that mouthy, Gandhi and other man brings in a lot of charge in village in short we can say that women of Kanthapura are ignorant but we witnessed the immense charge that is gradually bought about in psyche of the narrow minded prejudiced and understanding. 
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My presentation sem-1