A word on the title at the outset. The title, assimilated from Benedictus de Spinoza, better known as Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, is an indication to theA word on the title at the outset. The title, assimilated from Benedictus de Spinoza, better known as Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, is an indication to the leitmotif of the work which segregates it from other autobiographical narratives. As far as Spinoza was concerned, human bondage consisted of centering one’s being on an insufficient object that is to say on something short-lived and ephemeral rather than on something permanent. Freedom came only when one was able to control the lusts of the flesh and the weakness of the spirit and attach oneself to some permanent good. And this is precisely the passage that Philip Carey must follow in his youth. He falls into a gruesomely corrupting bondage to Mildred, knowing incessantly that she is a loutish prostitute. He is, nonetheless, too irresolute to liberate himself from his craving for her until he has grieved significantly. Mildred practically ruins his life on more than a few times. However, bit by bit Philip’s soul is eliminated of her sway. He regains control of his desires. His love for Sally Athelny at the culmination of the tome is perchance less ardent than his adoration for Mildred. Nonetheless, it is a saner and healthier emotion, one that will allow him to build an upright life rather than destroy himself. Thus, this novel is principally a success story in which the hero, after many prosecutions and hardships, habitually voluntary, emerges joyful and in general unhurt. The ideas that have influenced Philip finally evolve into an stylish, judicious cynicism about life and human motives. From every one of his love affairs, starting with Miss Wilkinson and ending in marriage to Sally, Philip learns something, mostly how to endure the torture of being in love with someone who derides or at best snubs him and how to unhinge himself eventually from the fetters of such love. To conclude, much akin to the tradition of ‘David Copperfield’, and ‘Sons and Lovers’, this tome is concerned with the growing pains — emotional, intellectual, and spiritual — of a youth on the way to maturity. It is a highly autobiographical record not only of the young Maugham’s life and loves but of his intellectual expansion as well, ranging from the miserable religious nurture in his uncle’s vicarage through the aromatic ethical autonomy of Heidelberg, the nonconformist life in Paris with all its illogicalities and catastrophes, and to end with the coming to grasps with the implication of life in London and in the kindhearted, no-nonsense home of the Athelny family. There’s little contradicting that Maugham is one of the best-loved English storytellers. And Maugham’s youth was uncannily analogous to Philip’s. Maugham studied at King’s School, Canterbury, and went to Heidelberg in preference to the more old-fashioned Oxford. A noticeable stammer produced the psychological outcome on Maugham that Philip’s clubfoot had on him. Introverted and desolate and miserable from inchoate tuberculosis, Maugham spent an anxious youth searching for his vocation. Like Philip, Maugham became a qualified physician, but he always desired to write. If this novel is expressively less piercing than ‘Sons and Lovers’, or hypothetically less thrilling and audacious than Joyce’s ‘Portrait of the Artist’, it is nevertheless a confidently crafted, well-balanced, and recurrently perceptive treatment of the great theme of youth’s ‘emerging’. In the numerous decades since its publication it has been widely and consistently popular. Read it once in your lifetime, at least. I guess I’ve read it over a dozen times, and everytime, it has ended up producing a different kind of emotion. ...more
In his preface Richards affirms that criticism is the endeavour to differentiate between experiences and to evaluate them.
In chapter I of hisRe-Read:
In his preface Richards affirms that criticism is the endeavour to differentiate between experiences and to evaluate them.
In chapter I of his book he dwells on the ‘chaos of critical theories’ and mentions ‘aesthetic choice’.
Chapter II is entitled ‘The Phantom Aesthetic State’ where he quotes Bosanquet to make the point, between the faculties of knowledge and desire stands the feeling of pleasure, just as judgment is in-between amid understanding and reason. He moves forward to observe that the aesthetic mode is generally supposed to be an uncharacteristic way of regarding things which can be exercised, whether the resulting experiences are valuable, or indifferent.
The third chapter, ‘The Language of Criticism’ deals with construction, design, form, rhythm and expression. Then he makes a distinction between experiences, one he calls the critical part and the other he calls the technical part. With regard to the technical part he comments, ‘we pay attention to externals when we do not know what else to do with a poem.
The fourth chapter is ‘Communication and the Artist.’ He is of the opinion that the artist is not as a rule consciously concerned with ‘communication’. His work is to ‘embody’ precise experience. He quotes from Paradise Lost and Kubla Khan and comes to the conclusion that the arts, if rightly approached supply the best data available for deciding what experiences are more valuable than others.
Chapter V is about ‘The Critics’ concern with value which is continued in chapter VI which is entitled ‘Value as an ultimate Idea’.
Chapter VII reconnoiters ‘A Psychological Theory of Value’ which is followed by chapter VIII, ‘Art and Morals’. Richards observes that the basis of morality, as Shelley insisted is laid not by preachers but by poets.
Chapter IX is entitled ‘Actual and Possible Misapprehension’ which concludes with reference to ‘pleasure’ which has its place in the whole account of values.
Chapter X ‘Poetry for Poetry’s sake begins by quoting two lines from a French poem,’ ‘one passes more easily from one extreme to another from one nuance to another. Richards rejects the theory of art for art’s sake and comments it ‘is impossible to divide a reader into so many men—aesthetic man, a moral man, a practical man, a political man, an intellectual man, and so no.’
Chapter XI is entitled ‘A Sketch for a Psychology’ where he notes that the mind is the nervous system, with which he relates a theory of feeling, of emotion.
Chapter XII is on ‘Pleasure’. He begins the chapter by noting sensation, imagery, feeling, emotion, together with pleasure, unpleased and pain which are names for the Conscious characteristics of impulses.
With this he passes in chapter XIII to ‘Emotion and the Coenesthesia’. His explanation is interesting. He refers to stimulating situations giving rise to widespread ordered repercussions throughout the body, felt as clearly marked colourings of consciousness. These patterns in organic response are fear, grief, joy, anger and other emotional states. These emotional states with pleasure and unpleased are customarily distinguished under the head of feeling from sensations. These sensations, or images of them, are then a main ingredient of an emotional experience and account for colour or tone.
Chapter XIV is on ‘Memory’. Richards refers to the richness and complexity of experience. There is no kind of mental activity in which memory does not intervene.
Chapter XVI, ‘The Analysis of a Poem’ is a fairly long chapter. Richards starts the chapter by noting the qualifications of a good critic which are three. ‘He must adept at experiencing, without eccentricities, the state of mind relevant to the work of art he is judging. Secondly, he must be able to distinguish experiences from one another as regards their less superficial features.’ In the rest of the chapter sensations and imagery- are discussed. He concludes the chapter by commenting that among all the agents by which the “widening of the sphere of human sensibility may be brought about, the arts are the most powerful.”
Chapter XVII deals with ‘Rhythm and Metre’. Rhythm and its specialised form, metre, depend upon repetition and expectancy. The texture of expectations, satisfactions, disappointments, which the sequence of syllables brings about is rhythm. Metre has a mode of action which may be mentioned. There can be little doubt that historically it has been closely associated with dancing.
Chapter XVIII, ‘On Looking at a Picture’ deals at length with mass, density of colour and space. Richards concludes by noting that the fundamental features of the experiences of reading poetry and of appreciating pictures, the features upon which their value depends, are alike.
In chapter XIX he mainly discusses form with reference to sculpture, by implying that a literary critic should have exposure to all the arts including music.
Chapter XX is entitled ‘The Impasse of Musical Theory’. He quotes from Gurney’s book, The Power of Sound, ‘The musical faculty defies all explanation of its action and its judgments.’ It is not very clear whether Richards theory approaches that of Pater.
Chapter XXI is on ‘A Theory of Communication’. ‘In difficult cases the vehicle of communication must inevitably be complex. The effect of a word varies with the other words among which it is placed.
Chapter XXIV, ‘The Normality of the Artist’, introduces the concept of imagination. He observes that there is nothing peculiarly mysterious about imagination. Richards takes an anti-Romantic and scientific attitude to imagination.
Chapter XXVI is devoted to ‘Judgment and Divergent Readings’. The main consideration here is ‘ambiguity in a poem’. Hamlet is cited as an example of great art whose greatness is accepted in spite of ambiguous readings.
Chapter XXVII, ‘Levels of response and the width of Appeal’ notes the possibility of a work of art being enjoyed at many levels which happens with Elizabethan drama.
Chapter XXVIII in dealing with ‘The Allusiveness of Modern Poetry’ makes a striking comment on allusion. Richards comments, ‘Allusion is the most striking of the ways in which poetry takes into its service elements and forms of experience which are not inevitable to life but need to be specifically acquired. And the trouble which it raises is simply a special instance of a general communicative difficulty which will undoubtedly increase for the poetry of the future.
In chapter XXIX, Richards discusses various theories of art from Aristotle, Coleridge to Croce. In the later part of the chapter he introduces the concept of belief. ‘There are few terms which are more troublesome in psychology than belief’. The bulk of the beliefs involved in the arts are provisional acceptances for the sake of the imaginative experience.
Richards focused attention upon the problem of discriminating good art from bad art and stressed the organic structure of the work itself.
To sum up, in this key work in the development of modern criticism Dr. Richards argues that literary criticism is fundamentally a branch of psychology, which deals with the states of mind induced by the experiences communicated by art.
And it was on this scientific basis that Dr. Richards created a new school of practical criticism devoid of subjective emotionalism.
There is an appalling lot of resemblance between the phase of life when the author penned this tome and the phase when I read it for the first time.
InThere is an appalling lot of resemblance between the phase of life when the author penned this tome and the phase when I read it for the first time.
In an earlier phase of his life the man wrote his ‘Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels’ (The Origin of German Tragic Drama, NLB, London, 1977) with the intention of taking up an academic career.
This was part of a ‘habilitation’ work in the form of a published edition which, if acknowledged, by the University of Frankfurt might fetch the man a teaching post. A regular job at the Goethe-Universität was a big deal back then.
However, Professor Hans Cornelius found ‘the nursprung to be an incomprehensible morass.’
Benjamin’s short-lived dream of an academic career sadly concluded.
The work was unconditionally far ahead of its time.
However, it still was a distinctive critical text. The ‘Epistemo Critical Prologue’ of the work was reasonably challenging and intellectually inspiring.
Take my case now. Me the green-horn! An unqualified reader!! I was introduced to this book for the first time in my College days.
Imagine my effing pluck! My kingshit ego! My audacity!! I was barely prepared for a book such as this.
I knew almost nothing of Critical Studies. Knew far lesser of the German theatrical philosophy!!
After a devastating and short-lived spell at German in The Goethe-Institut, also known as Max Mueller Bhavan back in my part of town (only to amaze my second solemn and short-lived crush back then, a beautiful, somewhat horizontal nosed and voluptuous dame), my German was unabashedly restricted to deciphered pieces.
So you get the earlier 'resemblance' I was speaking of? Neither was the society prepared for the author, nor was I, the reader, prepared for this book.
Subsequently, a solid cavity of a decade would pass.
And I would get at home in German history, the history of World theatre, probe profoundly into linguistics, shed my boyhood greenness and only then would in conclusion come to have my seat in the gallery of Alphas.
For starts, let’s quote a few mockups in an attempt towards communicating this book’s quality. The author says:
**‘Just as mosaics preserve their majesty despite their fragmentation into capricious particles, so philosophical contemplation is not lacking in momentum.’
**‘The relationship between the minute precision of the work and the proportions of the sculptural or intellectual whole demonstrates that truth-content is only to be grasped through immersion in the most minute details of subject matter.’
Perhaps the most striking observation is to be found on ‘ideas’.
The man says: ‘Ideas are to objects as constellations, phenomena are subdivided and at the same time redeemed; so that those elements which it is the function of the concept to elicit from phenomena are most clearly evident at the extremes. The idea is evident at the extremes; the idea is best explained as the representation of the context within which the unique and extreme stands alongside its counterpart.’
While trying to institute a relationship among truth, knowledge and ideas with reference to Plato’s Symposium, Benjamin makes certain observations which, incidentally might interest readers of English literature as a working clue for interpreting the Keatsian equation between truth and beauty.
He says: ‘....truth, it is not so much beautiful in itself, as for whomsoever seeks it. If there is a hint of relativism here, the beauty which is said to be a characteristic of truth is nevertheless far from becoming simply a metaphor ... .truth is the content of beauty.’
The Origin of German Tragic Drama is apparently a study of German baroque drama. Benjamin discusses the works of Andreas Gryphius, Daniel Casper von Lohenstein, Hallman etc. whom he considers to be lesser successors of Calderon.
The whole book, however, actually turns out to be anti- Aristotelian theory of drama whose relevance can be found, politically, in the troubled times of Weimar Republic, and artistically, in Expressionism.
Benjamin’s insistence on allegory, it may be noted, in his study of the mourning plays (Trauerspiel) is a search for meaning which he pursued throughout his life. The search for meaning could also be related to his study of history which needs to be exploited so that significant fragments of the past could be related to the present and be the vehicles of the revolutionary future.
The epicenter of baroque drama may be located in the following observation:
‘Here, as in other spheres of baroque life, what is vital is the transposition of the originally temporal date into a figurative spatial simultaneity. This leads deep into the structure of the dramatic form.’
This is further elucidated by the succeeding quotation:
‘In contrast to the spasmodic chronological progression of tragedy, the Trauerspiel takes place in a spatial continuum, which one might describe as choreographic.’
Unsurprisingly, the Trauerspiel of the German baroque appeared to be a caricature of classical tragedy. Benjamin suggests that the presentation of the Aristotelian formula of misfortune and distress is neither wanted nor conceivable while judging baroque drama, because that Trauerspiel is confirmed as a custom of the tragedy of the saint by means of the martyr-drama.
And if one only learns to distinguish its physiognomies in many different styles of drama from Calderon to Strindberg it must become vibrant that this form, a form of the mystery play, still has a future.
In a thought-provoking sentence Benjamin traces the origin of martyr-drama to ‘the death of Socrates as a parody of tragedy.’
Bejamin stresses the allegorical excellence of the Trauerspiel, we may guess, because it becomes the central motif of his aesthetics.
He quotes Goethe in an attempt towards defining allegory.
The allegorist seeks the particular in the general; Benjamin adds that an allegorical work of art serves the purposes of the expression of ‘a concept and the expression of an idea’.
Rather fascinatingly, while outlining allegory, Benjamin writes about ‘those comprehensive relationships between spoken language and script which provide the philosophical basis of the allegorical and which contain within them the resolution of their true tension.’
As one finishes reading this book, he realizes that this is not the work of an obscure academic, but the dedicated posture of an isolated Jewish intellectual, searching for meaning in a Germany, progressively becoming resplendent with threatening indecisions.
The book is sheer exquisiteness. Who am I to recommend it to you?
It was an honour to have read it.
And purely by Ma Chamunda’s elegances have I been able to decode as much of it as I have. ...more
This petite essay by Barthes is a very refined one. It looks forward to Derridean concepts of 'writing' and the relationship between the 'writing' andThis petite essay by Barthes is a very refined one. It looks forward to Derridean concepts of 'writing' and the relationship between the 'writing' and the 'reader' who creates the text. Here Barthes uses a few terms – ‘the author’, ‘writing’, ‘text’ and ‘critic’. Very delicately he explores the relationship amongst them.
In the essay the author's 'authority' is methodically challenged. He is interested in negating the very concept of 'writer' which is one step forward from Eliot's notion of 'impersonality'. Eliot had perceived that a poem exists somewhere between the poet and the reader. Let us refer to the end of the essay to gradually unfold the ideas of Barthes. Barthes observes that the 'the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.'
We may passingly refer to Baudelaire's observation about Poe, that which gives pleasure to the reader has killed the poet. The import of Baudelaire's observation was different, however. He was referring to the compulsive addiction to drinking of the poet which released his poetic self.
At the beginning of the essay Barthes quotes a few lines from Balzac's story Sarrasine to make the point that writing is that neutral, composit, oblique space where subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost. starting with the very identity of the body 'writing'.
The voice of the author (if we imagine a voice) is lost in writing. It should be noted that Barthes assumes the existence of the spoken word 'parole'. The prominence is given to writing. In primitive societies there was usually a narrator who was given different names in different countries.
The narrator was not an author. Author is a modern figure emerging from the Medieval period, English empiricism, French rationalism and Reformation. The author became someone with prestige. Finally through positivism and capitalist ideology, the figure of the author emerged.
In literary studies the author was made a central figure and discussions ranged round his person, his life and tastes. Criticism was directed towards personal features of the author. For example, Baudelaire's failure was attributed to Baudelaire the man. Van Gogh's failure was attributed to the artist's insanity. The work of art was always deliberated in terms of the author.
In France, Mallarme' was the first to undercut the image of the author. He substituted language for the person who was supposed to be its owner. For him and for us it is language which speaks, not the author writing assumed prequisite impersonality replacing objectivity of the 'realist novelist. Mallarme's complete poetics depended upon suppressing the author in the interests of writing to give importance to the reader.
Vale'ry also interrogated the position of the author stressing the linguistic and 'hazardous" nature of his activity. He concentrated his attention on the verbal condition of literature. He thought the idea of the writer's inferiority was pure superstition. Proust by punishing refinement distorted the relation between the writer and his characters.
Leaving aside literature, linguistics has peovided the destruction of the Author. Language knows a 'subject' not a 'person'. The undermining of the importance of the author transforms the modern text.
Every text is everlastingly written ‘here’ and ‘now’. The ‘Writing’ is a verbal form. The text does not give one meaning but is a multi- dimensional space in which a diversity of writings blend and clash.
This text is akin to a tissue of quotations as Eliot showed in The Waste Land.
As to how many times I've read this book, I do not remember properly.
For starters, the introduction isn’t me. This is from one of the most brilliant tAs to how many times I've read this book, I do not remember properly.
For starters, the introduction isn’t me. This is from one of the most brilliant tomes I had the honour of perusing on Poetica.
This is a 2019 tome by Jennifer Ferriss-Hill. It is entitled: ‘Horace's Ars Poetica: Family, Friendship, and the Art of Living’
The author says:
‘The Ars Poetica stands in a lineage of ancient works conceived of as repositories for the essentials of poetics, extending back to the writings of Aristotle, Neoptolemus of Parium, and Philodemus, and forward to pseudo-Longinus ‘On the Sublime’.
Horace’s 476-line poem was revered for over 1500 years as the indispensable guide for practicing poets; it provided a blueprint for efforts at “updated” rules of literary composition; and it inspired numerous famous translators and imitators, among them Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Ben Jonson, Nicolas Boileau, Alexander Pope, and many other European and American writers.
From the Ars Poetica have been quarried such oft-quoted phrases as in medias res (“into the middle of things”), ut pictura poesis (“poetry is like a painting”), and purpureus . . . pannus (“a purple patch”), or the dictum that poetry should be both pleasing and useful.
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism opens its entry on the work: “It would be impossible to overestimate the importance of Horace’s Ars Poetica (Art of Poetry) for the subsequent history of literary criticism.”
And yet this poem has proven hard to love for recent readers: it is “unfashionable today: unfashionable even amongst classicists, and certainly so amongst non-specialists.”
A fresh convention in ‘literary criticism’ would begin with this tome. The author would model this tome on the Aristotelian theory of Poetics.
Discussing about poetry, poetic style and drama, Horace would speak with vigour and directness as a person having a strong personal relationship with the reader. There would be a very very sharp focus on uniformity, accord and propriety. It would follow no manner or design that can be visibly made out, although scholars would determine in it the three-pronged usual divisions of an Alexandrian – Greek discourse such as: Poesis or subject matter, poema or form, and poeta or the poet… I need not jabber much. Give this tome a go.
Find a Latin instructor around you and dig into Horatius.
Ask your educator to teach you the meaning and internal reverberations of the following lines:
Humano capiti cervicem pictor equinam iungere si velit et varias inducere plumas undique collatis membris, ut turpiter atrum desinat in piscem mulier formosa superne, spectatum admissi risum teneatis, amici? credite, Pisones, isti tabulae fore librum persimilem cuius, velut aegri somnia, vanae fingentur species, ut nec pes nec caput uni reddatur formae. ‘pictoribus atque poetis quidlibet audendi semper fuit aequa potestas.’ scimus, et hanc veniam petimusque damusque vicissim; sed non ut placidis coeant immitia, non ut serpentes avibus geminentur, tigribus agni……..
Once you are through with the basic hurdles of Latin grammar, what remains is pure bliss. .
Give this a try. Up until the late Victorian age, they’d say that: “You’re a bloody uneducated dollymop!! You do not even know Horatius? You have no idea of Poetica? Be God-darned!!”
A few words to conclude:
And Horace would keep his enduring colophon on the subsequent generations. Why so? Simply for for two assertions. And o'er, both of these would be ultimately based on Aristotle: the need for sedateness or ratio and the need for incessant drudgery as the price of poetic immensity. Truth be told, the principal objective of Horace would be to demonstrate to the ‘would-be poet’ to achieve faultlessness in his art with a comprehensive knowledge of “what becomes him well and what becomes him ill, what is the path of excellence and what is the path of error”.
That is all there’s to it.
A few words to conclude:
And Horace would keep his enduring colophon on the subsequent generations. Why so? Simply for for two assertions.
And o'er, both of these would be ultimately based on Aristotle: the need for sedateness or ratio and the need for incessant drudgery as the price of poetic immensity.
Truth be told, the principal objective of Horace would be to demonstrate to the ‘would-be poet’ to achieve faultlessness in his art with a comprehensive knowledge of “what becomes him well and what becomes him ill, what is the path of excellence and what is the path of error”.
This 1916 tome, recreated posthumously from Saussure's lecture notes by his students, characterizes nothing less than a revolution in the theory of laThis 1916 tome, recreated posthumously from Saussure's lecture notes by his students, characterizes nothing less than a revolution in the theory of language, undermining many of the most cherished assumptions concerning the nature of signification dominant to that point in philology (from Greek roots meaning love [philos] of words [logos).
Although Saussure termed his philosophy of language 'semiology’, the name which has come to stick is 'semiotics’, a term coined by Charles Sanders Peirce, the American Pragmatist, to characterize his own similar views on signification.
Saussure rejects the main tenets of 19th century philology, epitomized by the pioneering works of men like Johann Gottfried von Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt. Saussure criticizes, initially, its historical (what he terms ‘diachronic’) and social focus, the view that the functioning of language is best elucidated with reference to its development over time and in distinct cultural contexts.
It is a commonplace, R.H. Robbins reminds us in A Short History of Linguistics, that the "19th century was the era of the comparative and historical study of languages". From this standpoint, for example, the meaning of a word in the present was thought to be derived from its etymology, that is, the history of the uses to which it was put in various contexts.
Secondly, Saussure criticizes the related expressivity view of language with which Humboldt in particular and the Romantics in general were synonymous. To be precise, the view that the ‘meaning’ of a word is that which is imparted to it by an ‘individual user’ whose idea about something it expresses. From this approach, a word means what an ‘idiosyncratic’ speaker / writer wants it to mean.
This is sometimes called the ‘ideational theory of meaning’. This view of language had replaced, at least on the European Continent. Earlier referential or correspondence or mimetic theories of signification, the view that a word means what it does by virtue of what it stands for, reflects, names, corresponds to or represents. From this point of view, a word means what it stands for.
In response to the first emphasis, Saussure stresses the importance of understanding how any language works at all given moments of its historical development and in any specific location, that is, irrespective of historical provenance or cultural context (he terms this emphasis the synchronic) striving to address the issue of how language functions in general.
Once you surmise this tome properly you’d understand that Saussure sought to answer the question: how is meaning produced irrespective of the culturally and historically-specific circumstance of language-use? (Numerous critics of Saussure have argued that this focus has led to what they describe as an ahistorical tendency in Saussurean and post-Saussurean thought.)
In response to the second emphasis, Saussure sought to debunk both the expressivity and referential theories of meaning, arguing that both views are predicated on a false understanding of the nature of the sign.
Saussure rejected the view that "readymade ideas exist before words" and for which words are merely a vehicle or instrument of expression. The reason for this, he argued, is that "our thought, apart from its expression in words, is only a shapeless and indistinct mass".
Language is the necessary milieu, the essential matrix without which meaningful thought cannot occur. Thought is not possible without the words by which it is rendered. Moreover, if language is indispensable for thinking to occur, sound when not allied to thought is in and of itself merely meaningless noise.
Thus, meaningful thought occurs only through the cooperation of pre-given systems of language with the physiological capacity of the brain to allow thought to occur. Meaningful thought is, in his celebrated though slightly confusing mathematical formula, a "series of contiguous subdivisions marked off on both the indefinite plane of jumbled ideas. sounds" and the equally vague plane of sound.
Saussure also argued that language does not consist in a "list of words each corresponding to the thing that it names".
Firstly, linguists argue that it is better not to speak of words when one is discussing the nature of the production of meaning. The correct technical term for the basic element involved in the production of meaning is sign. That is, words are verbal signs but signs also take other forms-anything can function as a sign once humans are involved in trying to interpret it; for example, clothes (hence, the phrase, 'fashion statement').
For Saussure, signs (e.g. c-a-t) do not just label or denote a prior reality or referent (that furry little animal out there that most of us have seen). If signs do not mean by referring to real objects, how, then, do they mean? According to Saussure, the nature of the sign is more complex than the traditional formula Sign → Referent, would seem to suggest.
Each sign consists of a signifier (Sr), which he defines as the 'sound-image.' that is, the phonic component of the sign (i.e. the sound made by c-a-t), which is attached in an arbitrary way to a signified (Sd) which is itself, importantly, a concept of or idea about reality rather than reality itself.
He compares signifier and signified to two sides of the same coin, pointing out that it is impossible to say or even write a signifier such as c-a-t without also simultaneously considering what it signifies (cat). By arbitrary, Saussure means that particular signifiers are attached to specific signified by convention rather than necessity. The proof of this is the existence of different languages which attach different signifiers to the same objects. If there were some natural, immutable bond linking a particular signifier to a particular signified, then there would not be different languages. Hence, Saussure's new formula for the sign is:
Sr → Referent Sd
The important point that Saussure is trying to make is that language does not provide us with unmediated access to or a transparent window upon 'reality.' Rather, language shapes how we apprehend reality. We can never 'know' the 'real' as it really is-which is not to say that reality does not exist. In a linguistic variant of the social constructionist argument, Saussure's point is that different language systems proffer different conceptualizations of reality (to put this another way, different languages signify the Real differently).
A good example of this is the fact that Eskimos, surprisingly, do not understand what we mean when we speak of snow. For them, there is no one 'thing' called snow. What we call snow they differentiate into several different 'objects. For us, it is all snow.
The decisive question that arises from the preceding is the following: if signs do not simply refer to reality and if there is no necessary or immutable bond between a particular signifier and a specific signified, then how do particular signifiers come to be attached to particular signified? Why does c-a-t designate our conception of that furry little animal out there that certainly exists apart from our apprehension of it?
For Saussure, the answer is quite simple:
Each sign (i.e. the attachment of a particular signifier to a particular signified) is part of a sign system which in the course of its historical development has dictated which signifiers should be attached to which signified. To put it simply, c-a-t came to be attached to cat because other combinations of sound (e.g. d-o-g or b-o-o-k) came to be attached to our conceptualizations of other furry animals or reading objects, etc.
In other words, a particular sign means what it does because it is part of a sign- system based on differences (or, to be accurate, distinctions). The signifier c-a-t means cat because d-o-g means dog and so on. A given sign means what it does only because it is differentiated from all other signs within the same sign-system. (If it were otherwise, clarity of thought would be impossible. we would be unable to differentiate the concept 'cat' from *dog' and so on.)
Difference is, therefore, the cornerstone of the functioning of any sign-system. In other words, both phonically and conceptually, 'cat' is 'cat' because it is not 'cap' nor 'bat.
Of course, it is exactly since the language system operates differentiall -- the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary rather than necessary. What one understands by the signifier 'cat' could have been denoted by any combination of letters. This particular combination came into existence precisely because other combinations were utilized to other ends.
This book is the mother lode of all the initial classics on Linguistics.
Indeed, in keeping with the rise to dominance of positivism in the second half of the 19th century, Saussure would become one of the founders of linguistics, the attempt in the 20th century to place the study of language on a scientific basis.
Though largely ignored in the Anglo-American Analytic philosophical tradition which has held on to many of these assumptions, Saussure's model of signification has had an enormous impact on several contemporary schools of Continental European philosophy, linguistics, social sciences such as anthropology particularly, and literary criticism, among others, giving rise to the movement which would come to be called Structuralism.
For starters Longinus’ writings aimed to refute Plato’s disdain for the poetry and art. ‘On the Sublime’, takes on the issue of the idea of transcendeFor starters Longinus’ writings aimed to refute Plato’s disdain for the poetry and art. ‘On the Sublime’, takes on the issue of the idea of transcendence. Longinus idea is that a great work is great because it makes us see things which are not there or in other words it sport of takes over our head. For Plato, such an idea was like a hermeneutic spell and he considered it dangerous. Rut Longinus has different opinion in this case; he seems to attack Plato in every possible way.
He says: “Great writing does not persuade; it takes the reader out of himself.”
Therefore in On the Sublime he is concerned about the elevation or maximizing the transport as for him it is the only true characteristic of great art.
Let us take a look at what Longinus says in his sublime. The first two characteristics discussed in sublime is of innate nature. In order to make a great art, an artist should be able to think great and feel powerful emotion and therefore an artist must have both a great soul and a great mind.
Later in sublime Longinus talks about the ability or the skill for comminuting this greatness, for he believes that such abilities can very well be taught.
It is important for the poet to possess the ability of forming the figures. Longinus also talks about the figure of expression and figure of thought. The poet should also have the ability to put the character and the phrases together.
Another quality which Longinus talks about is ‘noble diction’, i.e. ability to use proper words and metaphor without which a work of art would lose its soul. The final quality that Longinus refers to is that of the ‘dignified and elevated composition’.
The specific ideas of Longinus is not as important as his general ideas. He is considered to the first scholar who advocated that a great art emerges from a great soul.
Consider this: “What then did those immortals see, the writers who aimed at all which is greatest and scorned the accuracy which lies in every detail? They saw many other things and they also saw this, that Nature determined man to be no low or ignoble animal; but introducing us into life and this entire universe as into some vast assemblage, to be spectators, in a sort, of her entirety, and most ardent competitors, did then implant in our souls an invincible and eternal love of that which is great and, by our own standard, more devine. Therefore it is, that for the speculation and thought which are within the scope of human endeavour not all the universe together is sufficient, our conceptions often pass beyond the bounds which limit it; and if a man were to look upon life all around, and see how in all things the extraordinary, the great, the beautiful stand supreme, he will at once know for what ends we have been born.”
He considered the purpose of advancement or the transportation as the only and eventual motive of any art and that the only way to achieve is the use of proper elevated language. One might disagree with Longinus’ view about the use of elevated language, and in a way he himself gives a way for that.
He writes: “When, therefore, a thing is heard repeatedly by’ a man of intelligence, who is well-versed in literature, and its effect is not to dispose the soul to high-thoughts, and it does not leave in the mind more food for reflection then the words seem to convey, but falls, if examined carefully through and through, into disesteem, it cannot rank as true sublimity because it does not survive a first hearing.”
Thus we see that the reaction which an intelligent and a sensitive audience shows is what determines the work of the art rather than the value it has been given traditionally. ...more
The three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago—one incessant, protracted shriek of outrage—are, paradoxically, brilliant, bitter, disbelieving, and infuseThe three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago—one incessant, protracted shriek of outrage—are, paradoxically, brilliant, bitter, disbelieving, and infused with awe: awe at the strength characterizing the best among us, in the worst of all situations. In that monumental text, published in 1973, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn conducted “an experiment in literary investigation”—a hybrid of journalism, history, and biography, unlike anything ever written before or since.
All that has been documented in this tome is true to the core. In the Author’s note, Solzhenitsyn writes, “In this book there are no fictitious persons, nor fictitious events. People and places are named with their own names. If they are identified by initials instead of names, it is for personal considerations. If they are not named at all, it is only because human memory has failed to preserve their names. But it all took place just as it is here described…”
There is something extremely apt, mentioned in the introduction of this tome, penned by Edward Ericson: “The 20th century has proven, in quantitative terms at least, the most murderous in human history, as governments killed their subjects at record rates. For decades the word Holocaust served as shorthand for modern man’s inhumanity to man. Then one lone man added a second such term, gulag, which now appears in dictionaries as a common noun. Solzhenitsyn was one of the precious few who did anticipate the demise of the Soviet experiment, and he thought his book would help: “Oh, yes, Gulag was destined to affect the course of history, I was sure of that.” On one of his darkest days, February 12, 1974, the day before he was forced into exile, and precisely because Gulag had appeared in the West, he mused, “You Bolsheviks are finished—there are no two ways about it.”
This book has been built as semi-documentary and semi-autobiography. By using his own experiences as focal points for the exposition of the shared knowledge, Solzhenitsyn perceives all the revulsions of the Stalin-era and expressing outrage at the unsympathetic harshness of the system, wonders at the forte and nerve of the zeks, and expresses immense sadness for the tragedy that has befallen his country. Using his own familiarities as a plot-thread, binding together the stories he heard from other zeks, he interlaces a drapery showing the brutality and distress of the Soviet penal system. That drapery is gigantic and awash with horrors. Hardly any people in the West comprehend that Stalin’s preys, possibly no less than a whopping 30 million, far outstripped Hitler’s. Not counting the blameless millions executed in the camps and in the prisons, 15 million peasants perished due to a doomed national program: the vicious relocation that instituted Russia’s network of collective farms. Solzhenitsyn’s personal tragedy seems mild in contrast. He was but frivolously tortured during interrogation; other prisoners were famished, beaten, or shot while countless women prisoners were raped. Nevertheless, his narrative is the cord by which the others are bound. The truth of this book lies in Solzhenitsyn's amassing of individual and mass experiences of arrest, interrogation, torture and imprisonment. The notion that the awful mass slaughter and control of human rights was carried out in anticipation of the coming conflagration and, indeed, was crucial in guaranteeing the final Soviet victory in the “Great Fatherland War” over the Nazis fits not just Molotov’s and other Stalinists’ aphoristic rulings that “an omelette cannot be made without breaking some eggs” and that “forests cannot be cleared without chips flying”—in short, that lives had to be sacrificed to achieve the greater gains of Soviet-style socialism, is the greatest lore that is debunked in Solzhenitsyn’s book. Solzhenitsyn writes, “If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? ”
I’d end this review with an observations by Jordan Peterson in his 2018 Introduction: “Perhaps we could come to remember and to learn from the intolerable trials endured by all those who passed through the fiery chambers of the Marxist collectivist ideology. Perhaps we could derive from that remembering and learning the wisdom necessary to take personal responsibility for the suffering and malevolence that still so terribly and unforgivably characterizes the world. We have been provided with the means to transform ourselves in due humility by the literary and moral genius of this great Russian author. We should all pray most devoutly to whatever deity guides us implicitly or explicitly for the desire and the will to learn from what we have been offered. May God Himself eternally fail to forgive us if in the painstakingly-revealed aftermath of such bloodshed, torture and anguish we remain stiff-necked, incautious, and unchanged.
This novel explores the brittleness of human civilizations and ridicules, how one sticky trouble can lead to a comprehensive failure of social systemsThis novel explores the brittleness of human civilizations and ridicules, how one sticky trouble can lead to a comprehensive failure of social systems. When forced to depend only upon one another, humans can and do reach out to one another. This new consciousness of the importance of human dignity is revealed as almost spiritual in nature, and the novel contains hints of being a parable about spiritual blindness. It can also be a metaphor about humanity’s dearth of sympathy for outsiders. However, it needs mention that the structure of this novel is multifarious. The novel designates the most trifling of backgrounds and events in long sentences and paragraphs that often continue for pages at a time. Sentences are divided simply by the use of lines. And the sentences have an absence of colons, semicolons, hyphens, and quotation marks. It is often indistinguishable who is speaking. No single quotation is detached by lines; instead, commas and capitalizations mark the initial word of a new narrator. One thing which will strike you while in the narrative is that you must always pay very keen responsiveness to who is, or who might be, the speaker. You will take bit of a time to get used to it. But once you are, trust me you’ll be able to traverse the situation and stratagem without the support of any detectable indications. Saramago does not bother to name the caracters. What he does, instead is that he refers to the subjects of the novel in unclear and evocative expressions. This novel has been classified as belonging to the genre of "plague novels”. The readers are faced with a body politic that needs to apply rational and ethical policies to get rid of the metaphorical plague. This novel provides opulent insight into human conduct by following the undercurrents of a civilization not placed in any specific period or habitation. Do away with the preliminary malfunctions in storytelling and just hang in there. What you get is a brilliant modern-day classic. Most recommended....more
This is fundamentally a draft. But boy oh boy!! This is one of the finest drafts you could lay hands upon!!
Joyce started writing an autobiographical This is fundamentally a draft. But boy oh boy!! This is one of the finest drafts you could lay hands upon!!
Joyce started writing an autobiographical novel while he was still in his teens. It was a forthright narrative and was a delicately camouflaged biography of the author. The hero's development is described against the rich background of his family, friends, city and religion.
The family consisting of father, mother, brother and sister, is designated in great detail. His friends have diverse personalities and fixed opinions which are often dissimilar from those of Stephen but important to him. The sights and sounds of Dublin are pronounced with great gusto.
Roman Catholicism is described as a religion and as a part of their education. There is a lot of emphasis on Stephen's relations with his mother. He tells us that he read essays and books to her while she did ironing. He pronounces the last days of his sister and how he comforted her when she was on her death-bed. He prepared a paper on 'Art and Life' to be read at a meeting of the College Debating Society.
By 1908 Joyce had written about 1,50,000 words of this autobiographical novel. Then he comprehended that what he had written was not a portrait of the artist but of the artist's family, friends, city, country and church.
The stress was not on the advancement of Stephen but on incidents which happened around Stephen. It is the story of a sensitive son, brother, student, resident of Dublin and member of the Roman Catholic Church, gradually and excruciatingly training himself to be a writer.
The aim of Joyce in writing this book was to show the growth of Stephen as an artist. He, consequently, felt that this book was not emerging on right lines. The family and friends of Stephen and the environment of Dublin had taken very great space and the central light had not been kept on Stephen.
He, thus, decided to abandon this work and to revise the book in about one-third of its length, in five chapters only.
In this book which developed into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man he retained only those incidents which were directly connected with Stephen's growth as an artist. Much of the matter of the carlier book was then destroyed.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man appeared in book form in 1916. The portion of the earlier work which remained was published after the author's death as ‘Stephen Hero’.
The themes of Stephen Hero are Stephen's family, Stephen's friends (boys and girls), the life of Dublin, Roman Catholicism and Art. A Portrait has only one theme: art, and it describes how Stephen freed himself from the bondage of family, nation and church and made himself free to concentrate on the vocation of an artist.
This has been termed as one of the 10 most problematic tomes to read. It is indeed very tough. I myself gave up reading 17 times. I was overpowered evThis has been termed as one of the 10 most problematic tomes to read. It is indeed very tough. I myself gave up reading 17 times. I was overpowered every time.
Years after I had conquered this text, I came across an article in Irish times, entitled, ‘How to read Finnegans Wake … in 17 years’ by a certain Liam Heneghan.
Liam says, “Like a topographic map, most works of art perform an act of compression. In Lewis Carroll’s final novel, ‘Sylvie and Bruno Concluded’ (1893), a character, ‘Mein Herr’, describes the existence of a map drawn on the scale of a mile to the mile. Hardly a practical stratagem since, when unfolded, the map blots out the sun. A map, we are often reminded, is not the territory it maps. The analogy of novel and map is not a perfect one and yet does not each author, like the cartographer, make decisions about scale, about resolution, about when to be punctilious, and when to pass over a landform in silence?..”
Well, a ‘Wake’ in Ireland is an all-night watch near a cadaver, accompanied with laments and consumption of alcoholic liquor. However, Joyce uses the 'Wake' only as a ruse for fetching in all the awareness, opinions, spirits and philosophies of the world in this novel.
The chief character Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, is the keeper of a public house in Dublin. His initials (H.C.E.) also stand for "Here Comes Everybody".
Humphrey signifies the whole of humanity. His wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle represents the whole of womankind.
There is a survey of the history of mankind from the fall of man to his redemption. Then he gives us a synthesis of the thoughts and dreams of men and women through the ages. There is no sentimentalism or artificial nobility. He presents humanity in the raw. Men and Women are reduced to the lowest common denominator.
Joyce finds that his ideas cannot be expressed adequately by the conventional vocabulary and syntax of the English language. He coins words and phrases and twists the sentences to express his feelings.
The ordinary reader is, therefore, befuddled by this tome.
I am tempted to, I most certainly have to conclude this review with a portion from ‘The Cosmic Library’ review-version of this book. They say, and I quote:
“Finnegans Wake also consoles. It’s the book of death giving way to life, of a fall that generates rebirth. The story, as much as it has one, draws connections between figures associated with a fall: the central, disgraced character HCE; Humpty Dumpty; and Finnegan (from the Irish song “Finnegan’s Wake,” about a guy who falls, is presumed dead, then turns out to be fine). There’s nothing total about such falling in this book, no complete catastrophe.
The fall leads us into something much weirder.
Here’s a sample from the Wake itself:
The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy.
The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved livvy.
In collapse and decline we find hints of rebirth to some ancient glory—the return of the ancient Irish heroism of Finn MacCool. (“Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you’re going to be Mister Finnagain!”)
So we’re reading a book of sadness that leads to joy, of hazy connections that exist beyond gloom, beyond logic, and sometimes just at the level of sound (between Finnegan and Finn, again), all of which intimates the promise of life that never never makes perfect sense.
Notice, too, that the title of the Wake lacks an apostrophe. You can read the title as an encouraging command, urging all Finnegans, all of us fallen and struggling people, to wake up into free-floating consciousness within our routine, elemental experiences.
Episodes of Finnegan and Friends will trace this waking through one elemental experience at a time—of water, of dreams, of language—and each will be accompanied by notes like this one, on Joyce’s novel and on a related, Joycean life adventure…….”
This is a classic. However, my experience with this tome has been two-fold. Right in the days of my High School, our Grammar instructor had asked us (This is a classic. However, my experience with this tome has been two-fold. Right in the days of my High School, our Grammar instructor had asked us (read 'forced us') to go through this tome. I do not so much know about my classmates, but, I was lost in the enormity of the text. Frickin' 1700 plus pages. My mid-18 year mind would be aghast to discover that each topic from Nouns to Determiners, from Verbs to Syntax, from Prepositions to Case and Clauses have been dealt in encyclopaedic detail. I shelved the book and ran off.
And then I would rediscover this book post 25. I was an established educator by then. Yet my mind was yearning for more and more detail on Grammar and Style.
That was when I rediscovered this book. And I proposed to her. She obliged me by saying 'Yes'. We read our vows and consummated the bond.
She has been with me ever since. She is my consort. My soul mate....more
What makes up a brilliant essay? Well, innumerable things if you ask me. Of all genres of creative art, save Poetry, I guess Essays haunt me the most.What makes up a brilliant essay? Well, innumerable things if you ask me. Of all genres of creative art, save Poetry, I guess Essays haunt me the most. My students find me uncanny for my choice. My peers abuse me.
I myself have been a sucker for Bacon. I drool over his style. I have singlehandedly been the Reviewer Prime of so many of his Essays on Goodreads.
However, I love Goodreads for the singular reason that it chooses to ignore me completely. I have almost no followers, and I am not an Opinion Maker here. Hence, I can keep my opinions very silently and move ahead to the next text.
Now coming back to Bacon, I recollect a much-quoted portion from ‘The Two-Book Fallacy’.
Good old Francis says: “God has, in fact, written two books, not just one. Of course, we are all familiar with the first book he wrote, namely Scripture. But he has written a second book called creation.”
--- For me, the Prime Creation is the Essay.
I have wanted to review this essay for ages. And now I am reviewing it.
What is the central thought here?
Every common biography of the man would tell you that Emerson extracted himself from the ministry for a diversity of reasons. One of these was the problem of action versus contemplation.
Now, fascinatingly, as he withdrew, he scrutinised various types of heroes like the Man of Genius, the Seer, the Contemplative Man, the Student, the Transcendentalist, and the Scholar.
Henry James thought by scholar, Emerson meant merely the ‘cultivated man’, the man who has had a liberal education. But this is not true.
Emerson's TRUE HERO was the scholar, and the true vocation is that of the scholar. In trying to comprehend and construe this vocation, Emerson faces the tensions arising from a need to gratify the impulses of his youth, to meet the humanitarian demand, to direct his own inclination and to grasp and follow the ethical ideals of English Romanticism.
The result is an ideal for contemplation. The scholar is the Genius and also the inheritor of the New England Clergyman's values. But these two are not compatible. In trying to bring them together, he was forced to over-emphasize self-reliance.
Emerson's scholar has character which is a confident acceptance of the idea that the Universe is perfectly governed by God.
Character also involves honour, self-sufficiency, and self-reliance which arise from the soul's "absolute command of its desires." This would make all action unreal. Here is an ideal of indifference.
Emerson held that God "has given to each his calling in his ruling love...has adapted the brain and the body of men to the work that is to be done in the world." We must allow those who "have a contemplative turn, and voluntarily seek solitude and converse with themselves."
The task of the scholar is to organize the facts, and to find out the unworldly laws that regulate them. He is related to the man of genius. He is not active like the practical man. But he does influence his associates through the cataleptic radiation of his goodness. He is in a state of "virtual hostility" to society.
He resists material wealth and greediness. He understands that the world is an appearance, and he grasps absolute truth through contemplation.
The special attribute of the ‘Contemplative Man’ is character. But Emerson does not want the scholar to appear as a recluse, or as a coward.
Manual labour is said to enrich his vocabulary.
This is described as "pearls and rubies to (his) discourse."
The end proposed is literary. The scholar enters the world only to make the inarticulate thought "vocal with speech" More positively we are told that if the scholar turns towards humanitarian reform, he is likely to lose his self-reliance because of the tyranny of "the popular judgments and modes of action."
So the thoughtful man has to turn his attention toward the perspective of (his) own infinite life." He must explore and develop his own integrity. The scholar begins to find out for he can convert the world. And between inactive meditation and active reform, he chooses the former, though he claims the virtues of the latter.
The intellectual domination of Europe does interfere with the scholar’s integrity. This has led Emerson to emphasize the nationalistic aspect. At the same time, he has to high against materialism, the tyranny of the past, and the voice of the multitude.
Emerson himself remarked that "the path which the hero travels alone is the highway of health and benefit to mankind."
The scholar is more like Carlyle's Hero. He is a priest-king, a poet, a man of letters. He is the Transcendentalist who, as Emerson noted, is the heir of Puritanism. Then we have "scholars out of the church," out of the society.
As Thoreau put it, "the society which I was made for is not here." The scholar's way is not the "ease and plea- sure of treading the old road, accepting the fashions, the education, the religion of society." He must take up "the cross of making his own, and, of course, the self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the self-relying and self-directed." This is a remarkable task. It is not astonishing that one of his hearers called the address- "Our Yankee Version of a Lecture by Abelard." Here is a plea for the young scholar to ascend his proper intellectual throne with the help of reason. The scholar must be careful about the understanding which often corrupts reason. In other words, this is a plea for mental independence.
Emerson had almost a mystical faith in America. The new world came into being as a reaction to the institutions of the old world and the new world must have a new culture emerging spontaneously from the land.
America then becomes the symbol of freedom. Every American will have to be guided by the spirit: "A nation of men will for the first time exists because each believes him. self-inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men."
The scholar has a powerful eye with which he can achieve synthesis and relatedness. Emerson felt that America needs a "general education of the " eye. He wanted telescopes placed on every street corner so that one can always see the stars which take us beyond the horizon.
The American scholar who is "the world's eye," must become an astronomer who could feel, 'the grandeur of the impression the stars and heavenly bodies make on us. Here is the contrast between observation and vision. The scholar has the awareness of the value of vision, of "the inextinguishableness of the imagination." As he penetrates space, he recaptures the primal wonder which is the first affirmation of transcendental experience.
Here we have the idea of humanity as the "greater It idler the distinguishes came from Swedenborg. With the help of this idea he part men from whole men. Those who treat their careers as a mean of making a living are part men. Whole men are representative men who treat their activities as service to humanity. Then a farmer can be a whole man if he gathers food for humanity. The scholar sums the intellect of mankind in himself; and he thinks for the best interest of humanity.
"The American Scholar" has a consistent tone and the argument is developed systematically. This is because from the beginning we have the dominant organic metaphor. The essay depends on the concept of "One Man" which is the social body of humanity. As against this we have a society "in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man." Mechanical specialization has destroyed the organic completeness of manhood and of the individual.
In this essay Emerson emphasizes change, progression, and originality. Instead of merely absorbing the ideas of others, the scholar must try to create his own ideas. He must publish the living, contemporary truth. The object of knowledge is constantly growing, and the scholar "shall look forward to an ever expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator." The world has a unity and Man Thinking must understand it and live in harmony with the movement towards this unity.
The essay begins with the concept of undivided man and proceeds to define the scholar as Man Thinking. Here Emerson explores the creative soul in man. The strong soul, he says, finds opportunities for expression in actual living. Then the emphasis falls really on the man, not so much on the scholar.
The essay was constructed on the lines of a classical oration. It has its exordium, argument and peroration. First he shares the importance of the theme chosen. Man is greater than any of his functions; and he should, therefore, remember that he is first a man and then a scholar or a priest or any other. The function a person has, cannot be allowed to destroy the individual's nature, to destroy the functionary. Thus he states: "thinking is the function, living is the functionary." The scholar must be Man Thinking, not simply a thinker.
The three forces that shape a man into a scholar are nature, the mind of the past, and active participation in life.
Man and nature have a correspondence. There is an affinity between them. Man seeks to systematize and unify; and so he explores the laws governing facts. Here the scholar is a scientist who observes and classifies and who speculates on the relations between things.
The perception of relation is an ingenious and spontaneous act. Thus the "schoolboy, under the bending dome of day" has an intuitive apprehension that the laws of nature are also those of his soul. Nature and his soul appear as the manifestations of the same universal soul.
They arise from the same root and are related like leaf and flower, like the seal and its impression. If he learns of the one, he will know the other. Thus arises the command "know thyself" which is identical with "Study Nature".
The scholar is prejudiced by the mind of the past in so far as it is embodied in the great classics. He is not to be crushed by this tradition. Books can only inspire him and renew his own creativity. The scholar must "read God directly," live life and feel life. Reading must be followed by "periods of solitude, inquest and self-recovery." This is necessary because "genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over-influence." Books have an important service during "the intervals of darkness" when we have to "repair to the lamps which were kindled" in the past. Just as the unproductive fig tree may be inspired by the example of the productive one, so can a person by the example of the great man. The scholar must have creative reading.
Each man is similar to the other. But he is something "new in nature," and he must arrive at the old conclusions by himself. All minds are self-sufficient parts of the Universal Mind which is growing or expanding.
This leads Emerson to speak next of the influence of the life of action; the "scholar of the first age received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again."
The scholar must receive the world into himself. Experience is the means and the measure of knowledge. One knows only so much of himself as he knows of life. Experience offers the "raw material out of which the intellect moulds her splendid products."
Life is our source of experience and expression. The first and the last resort of the scholar is action, the total act of living.
The qualities of the scholar are included in self-trust; and his function is "to cheer, to raise, to guide men by showing them facts amidst experiences."
In order to attain this end he must walk alone. He may be scorned. But he must bear the cross, "the self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the self-relying and self-directed."
Emerson reminds us here, of our own Robi Thakur who said:
যদি তোর ডাক শুনে কেউ না আসে তবে একলা চলো রে।
It means:
If they pay no heed to your call walk on your own. Walk alone, walk alone, walk alone, walk all alone. If none speaks, o wretched one, If all turn their face away and cower in silence— Then open out your heart dear one, speak out your mind, voice alone.
He has his compensation when he becomes "the world's eye" and "the world's heart". His work is that of "preserving and communicating heroic sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of history."
This function requires self-trust. Hence, Emerson urges the scholar to keep reliance on himself. The scholar has to be unrestricted and daring and valiant.
The scholar finds that in "going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds."
Since man has the divine in him, the world is still "plastic and fluid and he can impress on it his " net and form". Since each man comprehends the particular natures of all men, each one is capable of sinking all the thoughts and performing all the acts and thoughts done by all men in the past. Coming to the present, Emerson states. "This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it." Accordingly, he grasps the nature of the present time and declares: "I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into today and you may have the antique and future worlds." This is conceivable since, like the universal soul, the highest law is inherent, even in the meekest object.
And "one design unites the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench."
Next, Emerson gives the authors who have had the "perception of the worth of the vulgar."
The literature of the times has given an importance to the "single individual". This recognition is the real basis of unity: "Everything that tends to insulate the individual -to surround him with barriers of natural respect so that each man shall feel the world his, and man shall treat with man as sovereign state with a sovereign state-tends to true union as well as greatness."
The scholar must be self-sufficient and self-dependent. He must know all.
The American scholars "we will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. This spirit will give rise to "a nation of men" where each one will be "inspired by the Divin Soul."
The refined, patrician, chivalrous tradition of Europe is to be replaced by the democratic and realistic tradition of America.
This can be applied to any country and to any literature.
Herein resides the universality of appeal which the Essay has.
An essay, written by man, at any point in time of human history, rarely gets more honest and sublime than this. ...more
Thoreau is one of the paramount nature-lovers in all of American literature. At Walden Pond he lived in contiguous immediacy with Nature and establishThoreau is one of the paramount nature-lovers in all of American literature. At Walden Pond he lived in contiguous immediacy with Nature and established a Wordsworthian closeness with Nature's aspects and moods. We may even call him Wordsworth of America, even though he wrote in prose and we find a lot of variance between their treatments of Nature.
Like Wordsworth, Thoreau had reflective and sincere love for Nature. He wanted human beings to develop a deep relationship with Nature. Like Wordsworth, Nature captures Thoreau's imagination.
Thoreau had a heightened feeling for Nature and was a keen observer of its various facets and moods. The relationship which he developed with Nature is clearly illustrated in what he observed at Walden Pond and around it in the woods.
In the chapter called "Sounds", he captures the innumerable sounds of Nature which he heard at Walden Pond. The distant lowing of some cow sounded like sweet music to his ears. Sitting on his doorsteps he would hear the whip-poor-wills chanting their "Vespers" and would be thrilled.
He found the miserable scream of the screech-owls as truly Ben Jonsonian. It seemed to him as if they were screaming "O that I never had been born".
He rejoices at their idiotic and maniacal hooting, and says, "It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognised." Thus he meticulously associates the hooting of owls with human beings, and says that the owls represent "the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have.'
He particularly admires the crowing of a cock. He advises the keeping of a cockerel just for its music.
According to him, the clear and shrill crowing of cockerels can "put nations on the alert". He associates the crowing of a cock with early rising and says that if a man attunes himself to a cock's crowing, he would develop a healthy and most desirable habit of early rising, "till he becomes unspeakably healthy, wealthy, and wise".
The crowing of the cock is celebrated by all people with a poetic feeling. "All climates agree with brave Chanticleer. His health is ever good, his lungs are sound, his spirits never flag."
Thoreau thought of himself as being a part of Nature: "I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself." Though Thoreau lived a solitary life at Walden, he never felt lonely or melancholy. Nature was the best company for him. In the chapter "solitude" he tells us that he found an infinite intimacy with every sight and sound of Nature. Thoreau was never lonelier than the loon in the pond that laughed so loud, or than Walden Pond itself.
In "The Village" he says that it is quite an experience to get lost in the woods: "often in a snow-storm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-known road and yet find it impossible to tell which may lead to the village."
He philosophises: "Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves."
The chapter entitled "The Ponds" provides still more evidence of Thoreau's great powers of observation and capacity for striking a relationship between himself and Nature. He goes to great lengths in describing the pond in all its dimensions, colour of its water, rise and fall in its level, etc.
He goes on to say that on certain days, "Walden is a perfect forest mirror, set round with stones as precious to my eye as if fewer or rare. Nothing so far, so pure, and at the same time as large as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth."
In "Brute Neighbours", there is an interesting account of a war between two kinds of ants, red and black. He terms it as an "internecine war" between the "red republicans" and the "black imperialists", both fighting more resolutely even than the human soldiers, and no party showing the least inclination to retreat.
Their battle cry was "Conquer or die". For sheer numbers slain and slaughtered, it was compared with Austerlitz or Dresden. He was convinced that the ants were fighting "for a principle".
He draws an equivalence between the "War between ants" and the human feelings. He goes on to describe the prolonged game he played with a look at the pond.
In this manner, Thoreau enters into an association between himself and the thing or creature observed. Throughout this particular episode, Thoreau makes embedded references to loon's powers of evading the hunter. But soon he has to face reality when the loon becomes a target of the hunter's skills.
According to Thoreau, Nature has much philosophical importance. He says, technology and the development of cities have come between man and Nature. He wonders if man can thrive in his state of separation from the elemental Nature which is an abiding source of sanity and strength.
Thoreau shows the way how man long estranged from the world of Nature (of which he is a part) by the compulsions of modern living, can re-establish his identify with it (Nature). He also asks us to have a sort of respect for the inherent qualities of animals, which seem to epitomize human ideals without human shortcomings.
Thoreau also describes many sights and sounds at the approach of spring in the chapter "Spring". He plays with squirrels, trying to scare them away, but they remain unafraid. He hears the blue bird, the song sparrow and the red wing singing and goes into ecstasy. In spring he sees the rejuvenation of Nature all around.
He terms the change from winter to spring as a memorable crisis. He sees a robin dancing and is thrilled. Likewise he enjoys the sight of geese smoothly sailing on the surface of the pond.
We find a perfect consonance between man and Nature in Walden. The book triumphs in establishing this close inter-relationship. Thoreau takes us along with him in his panoramic view of nature in its variegated splendours-sights, sounds, creatures, vitality, renewal and rejuvenation.
On viewing every aspect of Nature, he unsurprisingly tends to envisage human existence. The cockerel's crowing inspires him to think of the health and wakefulness of men. He goes poetic in the presence of the objects of Nature. "Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rainstorms in the spring or fall, which confined me to the house for the afternoon as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting."
This book triumphs in the superb grace with which it conjoins the life of Nature with the life of man. A must-read. ...more
The book itself begins like this: In its own way, this book consists of many books, but two books above all. The first can be read in a normal fashionThe book itself begins like this: In its own way, this book consists of many books, but two books above all. The first can be read in a normal fashion and it ends with Chapter 56, at the close of which there are three garish little stars which stand for the words The End. Consequently, the reader may ignore what follows with a clean conscience. The second should be read by beginning with Chapter 73.. Therefore, this tome is thus two narratives, conceivably many more. In one of the interpretations the reader should stay on the chronicle in a in the customary, rectilinear style and the second evolving by construing the episodes out of arrangement, consistent with the author’s lessons. This novel is considered a landmark in Latin American literature in the 20th century. Cortazar focuses on the problem of reading, and falling into a gap that opens between the differing worlds such as that is popularly believed that his book can be opened at any page and read for any length of comprehend the essential message. It recalls the work of Cortazar contemporary Argentinian, Jorge Luis Borges, who insists that narrative is a maze of forking paths from which a reader can construct several realities. There is no enchantment but a countless such likelihoods in Cortazar’s Hopscotch, which led to a ‘boom’ in Spanish American literature. Most recommended. ...more
Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling: The Bird of Time has but a little way To flutter—and the Bird is oCome, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling: The Bird of Time has but a little way To flutter—and the Bird is on the Wing….
FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat is one of the greatest translations in world literature, evenly balanced with the Baudelaire and Mallarmé translations of Edgar Allan Poe, the Schlegel-Tieck translations of Shakespeare, and the King James translation of the Bible.
FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat points unambiguously to the poetic and philosophic dominance of 11th -century Persia over the prosaic, superstitious, intellectually primitive 11th -century West, a West still sunk in poverty, overrun by barbarians, confused, illiterate, depopulated, and primarily rural.
Far from looking down on Omar and his world, FitzGerald found there a better, more humane, more appealing world than that offered by Victorian England.
In FitzGerald’s hands, individual Persian quatrains amalgamated into one of the most poignant and most often cited modern poetic statements about forfeiture, yearning, and reminiscence.
The imagery of the Rubaiyat is wild, flamboyant, and extraordinary. It is a proto-modern achievement, hanging just on the lip of modernity.
Bloom has this to say:
A great eccentric, fortunately endowed with private means, Fitzgerald made a dreadful mistake in 1856 by marrying the daughter of a deceased friend, the Quaker poet Bernard Barton. After a year of quarrels, the couple separated, and Fitzgerald solaced himself by composing his Rubdiyat.
The historical Omar Khayyém (1048-1131) was a renowned astronomer and mathematician but only a minor poet, content to write many epigrams. Rubdiydt simply means quatrains, following a rhyme scheme (aaba).
A close friend, a scholar of Persian, made the manuscripts of Omar available to Fitzgerald. Published by an antiquarian bookseller and soon remaindered, Fitzgerald’s Rubdiyat would have vanished utterly except that a copy reached Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who fell in love with the poem. Rossetti introduced it to his circle, including Algernon Charles S winburne, William Morris, and George Meredith, and these enthusiasts made it known to a soon enthralled general reading public.
The poem became a transatlantic cult, and continues to be a part of Anglo-American literary culture.
Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness — Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!...more
In Milton’s poetry “more is meant than meets the ear.”
Macaulay in his ‘Essays on Milton’ has this to say:
“His poetry acts like an incantation. Its mIn Milton’s poetry “more is meant than meets the ear.”
Macaulay in his ‘Essays on Milton’ has this to say:
“His poetry acts like an incantation. Its merit lies in its obvious meaning than in its occult power. There would seem, at first sight, no more in his words than in other words. But they are words of enchantment. No sooner are they pronounced than the past is present and the distant near. New forms of beauty start coming at once into existence, and all burial places of the memory give up their dead. Change the structure of the sentence, substitute one synonym for another, and the whole effect is destroyed. The spell loses its power ; and he who should then hope to conjure with it would find himself as much mistaken as Cassim in the Arabian tale, when he stood crying ‘Open Wheat’, ‘Open Barley’, to the door which obeyed no sound but “Open Sesame”.”
This work is that of a man who is a prodigious master of verbal melody and a flawless magician in the matter of using words and phrases.
This is a man who chooses every word cautiously and by their preparations and amalgamations creates a pleasingly poetical effect.
And this is a man who has has invented a new poetic diction, which like a rich and stiff brocade can stand alone without a thought…
Give this tome a go. This has life-altering effects… ...more
Curious Afterword by William Vollman in the Ralph Manheim edition of the translated novel: Reader, fuck you! … You think I gi#With the Classics – 2017
Curious Afterword by William Vollman in the Ralph Manheim edition of the translated novel: Reader, fuck you! … You think I give a shit whether or not you’ve read this book? Or that Céline’s ghost does? That would be the day! And why should you have read Journey to the End of the Night? Freedom fries and to hell with the French for an American war and this nightmare criminal idiot of a President we’ve got—that’s satire as hilarious as when Robinson murdered the old lady! And it all happened HERE, in this big fat country whose standards of personal hygiene and optimistic self-delusion Céline almost admired; he adored the narcissistic sleekness of American women; this fat country of ours went around stepping on anthills, until finally, I think in 1977 or 2043, some of the ants bit back, so we killed a hundred thousand Irishmen who had nothing to do with it, but the French objected at the start, so right here in California in my hot flat hometown, somebody scrawled on the side of a building: EVEN JESUS HATES THE FRENCH.
All said, this novel deals with the movement of the human consciousness in the direction of order and understanding, the process of becoming, the soul-crippling oppression of romantic idealism, the creative benefits and drawbacks of illness, the psychic truth of phantasm and dreams, the debauchery of society, and the importance of violence and death in a realistic view of existence…
And it goes on to remain as one of the best books ever written. Highly recommended....more
Paine's The Age of Reason, divided into two parts, was published in 1774 and 1775 respectively. It is the most outstanding- political work of the 18thPaine's The Age of Reason, divided into two parts, was published in 1774 and 1775 respectively. It is the most outstanding- political work of the 18th century. It was a powerful avowal of his faith in deism, which gave rise to such a furore that the orthodox felt that Paine should be burned for blasphemy. What he said about orthodox Christianity was sure to sound as blasphemy. He was denounced as an atheist, which he was not. He unequivocally declared: "I believe in one God and no more." Explaining Deism he emphatically said:
The only religion that has not been invented and that has in it every evidence of divine originality, is pure and simple Deism. It must have been the first and will probably the last that man believes.
He further stated: Were men impressed as fully and strongly as he ought to be with the belief of a God, his mortal life would be regulated by the force of that belief, he would stand in awe of God and of himself, and would not do the thing that could not be cancelled from either. To give this belief the full opportunity of force, it is necessary that it alone. This is Deism.
He exalted reason and condemned rituals and hypocrisy. He said: "My mind is my own church". He believed in and consistency. He order and agreed with Newtonian mathematical world-view, according to which the world is a smooth running, well organised and rationally conducted machine.
Thomas Paine was great and gifted writer, thinker and statesman in the eighteenth century. He was one of the most fearless thinkers of America, which, he said, was "the country of my heart and the place of political and literary birth". In all his works Paine displayed an amazing power of phrase-making and a journalist’s sense of dramatic timeliness. His style is up-front, unpretentious, vibrant, persuasive, farsighted, swaying and convincing; for example:
O ye that love mankind….. Every spot in the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger; and England hath given her warning to depart. Oh! receive the fugitive; and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.
Paine was a “master rhetorician”. He said emphatically: “Of more worth is one honest man to society, and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived” and “The world is my country, to do good my religion”.
Paine’s influence was immense. He appealed to the masses of America, convinced them about the importance of independence,, and “turned the resistance movement into revolt”. He said with conviction: “the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”
He urged his compatriots to show courage and determination in adversity: I love the man that can smile in trouble, which can gather strength from distress and grow grave by reflection. It is the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, would pursue his principles up to death.
Paine influenced American Revolution and the thought of men into whose hands the new government was to be entrusted. He was one of America’s most fearless thinkers, with a mind free from traditionalism, superstition and dogmatism. According to The Literwy History of the United States Paine gave expression to “American life at its most decisive moment, he made his place in the formative literature of the new republic.” ...more
For me “The Myth of Sisyphus” marks the beginning of an idea which I was to pursue in The Rebel. It attempts to resolve the problem of suicide, as Th For me “The Myth of Sisyphus” marks the beginning of an idea which I was to pursue in The Rebel. It attempts to resolve the problem of suicide, as The Rebel attempts to resolve that of murder, in both cases without the aid of eternal values which, temporarily perhaps, are absent or distorted in contemporary Europe. The fundamental subject of “The Myth of Sisyphus” is this: it is legitimate and necessary to wonder whether life has a meaning; therefore it is legitimate to meet the problem of suicide face to face. The answer, underlying and appearing through the paradoxes which cover it, is this: even if one does not believe in God, suicide is not legitimate. Written fifteen years ago, in 1940, amid the French and European disaster, this book declares that even within the limits of nihilism it is possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism. In all the books I have written since, I have attempted to pursue this direction. Although “The Myth of Sisyphus” poses mortal problems, it sums itself up for me as a lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very midst of the desert. [Camus: Introduction] The truth of Sisyphus of 1942 was the truth of industrialism and political fierceness; extermination performed on industrial scale and with industrial means, making his conflict a revolt of human self-respect, threatened with the unkind, quiet and conceivably futile world. Camus believed that to win, one has to challenge this hush, to break this hush, and expose the dishonesties of philosophies, tied with political practicality. His revolt, originally levelled against metaphysics and suicide, progressively became more engaged with homicide and politics....more
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