2 Post Stucturelism

Proceedings of National Seminar on Postmodern Literary Theory and Literature , Jan.
27-28, 2012, Nanded
Post-Structuralism: An Indian Preview

--Prof. Nishikant Mirajkar Dept. of English, Delhi University, Delhi.
It has been a long practice among Indian litterateurs to borrow literary theories from the West as and when these become known to them, or, should I say, to welcome these with open arms without considering their viabilities in the Indian context or without trying to understand these with an Indian perspective, and then either engaging their creative talents to copy the models blindly or try to fit in the existing Indian creations to the canons of these theories while reviewing them. I remember an occasion when Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak once delivered a tedious lecture on Derrida in Delhi University and when the questions were invited after the lecture, Professor Premsing of the Department of Linguistics rose and said, Madam, What difference would it take in our understanding of Indian literature if we scrap todays lecture totally from our memory? Taken aback, Gayatri fumbled for words before answering that question. Here in this paper, an attempt will be made to understand the post-structuralism by juxtaposing its features with the Indian scenario and then trying to judge its feasibility in understanding and evaluating Indian literature. We have to begin our quest from reviewing Roland Barthes (1915-1980). He was basically a structuralist, actually, the forerunner of the new generation that emerged in the sixties in Paris. His major contribution was in the field of semiotics of literature. Later, he emerged as the pioneer of post-structuralism, mainly with his article From work to Text. His revolutionary claim that the text is not an object, but it is a process, was the beginning of a new thinking. He highlighted the difference between the text as a book and the text as a literary experience by pronouncing that the objects of write-ups are available in the library, but the texts are sites where the playful creation of meaning goes on taking place continuously. This creation and recreation of meaning is different from receiving or accepting the write-up. It is a
playful recreation of different meanings and patterns; similar to the enjoyment of sexual pleasure, claimed Roland Barthes. In order to understand the natural process of different perceptions of meaning claimed by Rolland Barthes, let us turn to a mischievously humorous story ignoring its superficiality in the current serious discourse. Once there was a teenager boy heavily addicted to tobacco-chewing. His father, disgusted with the repulsive addiction of the boy, decided to take him to a holy place hoping to motivate a positive change in his attitude. He took the boy to a temple of Vitthala and was delighted to find his son gazing intently at the idol. His joy, however, was short-lived when the son uttered, Father, look, the God is demonstrating how the tobacco plant could grow only waist-high, by placing both his palms upon his waist! They then went into a Ganesha-temple and looking at the idol of Ganesha with his right palm in a boon-giving posture and the left palm in a meditation posture with the thumb pressing the index finger, the boy exclaimed,Father, the God is signaling that the leaf of the tobacco plant is a palm-size, but you should take just a pinch of it! On seeing the idol of Hanuman with his puffed cheeks and raised arm in a striking position, the boy said, Look, father, the God is relishing his tobacco-juice and warning us not to disturb him, else he would hit! Leave aside the humor in this superficial story and deliberate over its message which indicates that there can be different and sometimes quite unexpected interpretations of the text akin to the personality, aptitude and interest of the interpreter. No branch of iconography would have predicted the interpretations imagined by the addicted boy of the story. It is a common experience that the rape scenes and fighting scenes in popular Hindi cinema invoke different responses from different types of the audience. While it induces disgust and fear in some viewers, every exposure of the rape-victims skin and advances of the rapist is
77
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
Proceedings of National Seminar on Postmodern Literary Theory and Literature , Jan. 27-28, 2012, Nanded
met with vulgar whistles and shrieks if excitement from the front-block viewers. Moving back from this transgression to the serious literary business, let us take into account the nature of the texts in ancient Indian literature. Ancient Indian texts like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and even some of the later epics were never restricted to their written form. Interpolations and variations were not frowned at as the transmission of the texts was in the oral form. Thus they are aptly called as the mobile texts. A further extension of their mobility is underlined by the fact that their movement (I do not say the translation deliberately) into other Indian languages from Sanskrit is marked by genuine alterations and deviations in response to the literary traditions of those languages and influence of their surroundings. The Ramayana by Valmiki in Sanskrit, by Kamban in Tamil, by Tulsidas in Avadhi and by Eknath in Marathi are different varied forms of one text which is formed in the public psyche as The Ramayana. A common man would not believe you if you tell him that the famous Lakshmanresha, a circle drawn by Lakshman around their hut to protect Seeta from any possible danger warning her not to cross it under any circumstances, is not a part of the Sanskrit Valmiki Ramayana, or the extremely popular confronting dialogue between Lakshman and Parashuram is an invention of Ramleela troupes and not part of any written text, or the portrayal of Ram as an incarnation of the Almighty presented by Tulsidas is totally different from his portrayal as an ideal human being presented by Valmiki. This is exactly what is meant by playful recreation of different meanings as expressed by Roland Barthes. So the concept of mobile text in ancient Indian literature is quite helpful in understanding the concept of text as sites where the playful creation of meaning. Even when we come to the texts in modern times we find some useful illustrations to facilitate the understanding of the concept. Those familiar with Marathi poetry know how different critics have presented different interpretations of poems like Oudumbar by Balkavi, Chafa by Bee and Navavadhu Priya Mi Bavarate by Tambe. After initial debate over which interpretation is the correct one,
finally it was agreed that all of them are simultaneously acceptable leaving place for further different interpretations, if any. Barthes developed this idea further in his book The Pleasure of the Text (1973/1975) and finally pronounced in Death of the Author (1977) that a perception of the text cannot be tied to the author, or a real person or his or her intention. This point can well be understood by taking into consideration appreciation of the sculptures of the copulating couples at Khajuraho. There have been different theories about the intension of the sculptors in sculpting such erotic figures in the vicinity of temples, but none of these match with the perception of the viewers while appreciating the artistic beauty of these sculptures. Coming back to the literary scenario, take the case of the historical novel Swami by Ranjit Desai. Rightly without taking into consideration his intentions, critics have interpreted and criticized the presentation of history, the characterization of the protagonist and the end of the novel glorifying the eradicated custom of Sati. Death of the God was proclaimed by Nietzsche. Now Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author. He pioneered the post-structural viewpoint that there is no possibility of the personality of the author being reflected in the text and also there is no need to investigate the intension of the author in order to decipher the meaning of the text. For, text is not at all a material object created by a person called the author. Text is created from the process of writing and the reader has the right to decipher the text. (Does this argument remind us of the reception theory in Comparative Literature? The readers response to literary creation is held there with equal importance and seriousness.) Let me cite an interesting episode from my childhood here. When I was studying in my S.S.C. class, we had the poem Datapasun Datakade by Vinda Karandikar in our textbook of Marathi. P.G.Sahasrabuddhe, a very reputed Marathi critic, used to write a guide for the S.S.C. Marathi text, without any feeling of guilt or shame as his guide was meant not for below average students to mug up the answers of probable questions, but for scholars to mould their talents effectively. Before discussing the poem, Sahasrabuddhe gave a note saying, We give below the meaning of the poem as we
78
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
decipher it. We had sent this interpretation to the poet for his perusal, but in his reply he ridiculed us saying that this was not his intention at all while writing the poem and the poem is beyond our comprehension. However, despite this ridicule from the poet, we firmly believe that the meaning of the poem is as we are giving below. Such bold rejection of the intention of the poet and firm insistence of the right of the reader to decipher the meaning of the poem came in 1957, well before Roland Barthes proclamation in 1977! Barthes explained that the process of the construction of the meaning takes place in the reader, or in the readership. The author has nothing to do with it. He has done his job. He has written a text and presented what he wanted to present. Now he has to move away and allow the reader to negotiate with the write-up, decipher his meaning and create his text. He has to die so that the reader could be born. The death of the author is the birth of the reader and consequently the birth of the process of creating a text. As many texts of the same write-op are possible as many are the readers. This is the reason why there are different readings of a text leading to different types of analysis and different evaluations of the same text. For example, the feminist reading of V.S.Khandekars novels or even Vijay Tendulkars plays can bring out quite different evaluation of them than the traditional one and the cultural criticism of translations of Shakespeares plays in Marathi can bring out totally different picture that what we used to project. The notion of the ambiguity of the author and the non-rigid nature of the text is known to Indian literature since the ancient time. Who was Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharata? Modern research claims that Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharata might not be a single person, but a tradition of disciples of the same clan. Even the text was not the same in the beginning as it appears today. Initially it was a small composition entitled Jaya, then it expanded to become the Bharata and finally it took the shape of the Mahabharata. As regards different readings of a single text, Shreemadbhagawadgeeta is a glaring example. Different commentators have
interpreted its text differently. Shankaracharya found Sanyasa as its core-message, Dnyaneshwar emphasized on Bhakti and Tilak interpreted the same text as giving the message of karmayoga. Having said all this and having understood the notions in the light of Indian literature, it would not be impertinent to raise a question, which should be lingering in our mind by now. Things like insignificance of the author while deciphering the meaning of the text and the right of the reader to decipher the meaning are all right, but what about enriching the sensitivities of the reader by taking into consideration the personality of the author? It may add new dimensions and extra layers of perception to his understanding. Take the example of Savarkars poem Sagara, Prana Talamalala. Savarkar composed this poem on the beach of Brighton when the clouds of the possibility of him being arrested in England were hovering over his mind and his heart was paining with the fear of losing the sight of his motherland forever. If a reader approaches this poem with full knowledge of Savarkars personality, his unprecedented sacrifice for the nation and the condition of his mind when he composed the poem, his deciphering the meaning is bound to be enriched. Ganesh Choudhari was an over-sensitive schizophrenic man in Jalgao. He killed his wife and children in a fit of rage brutally with an ace. Later, in the prison, as part of his mental treatment he was advised to express his feelings in words. He wrote poems and the poems were o such a caliber that the collection of those poems bagged the literary award of the Government of Maharashtra. The anguish of his repenting broken heart is intensely expressed in those poems. Now, if a reader deciphers the meaning of these poems with the knowledge of the poets personality, his deciphering is bound to be enriched. Exactly the same tune is found in the arguments of Michel Foucault (1926-1984), another flag-bearer of.post-structuralism. He contradicted Barthes concept of total elimination of author and argued that, if writing is considered as a cultural and historical process, then authorship is an essential and inevitable
79
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
factor of this process and it cannot be totally eliminated. Foucaults another contribution in poststructuralism is in the area of relation between history and literature. In his book The Archeology of Knowledge (1972), Foucault claims that history can never be presented in a static form; for, it consists of various pasts, various chronologies and cause-effect relations and hierarchies. The entire fiery debate over the historicity of Vijay Tendulkars play Ghashiram Kotwal becomes insignificant in this light. Foucault discusses four stages of the history of European literature that corresponded with four ideologies. According to him, the stage of renaissance corresponded with the ideology of resemblance, the classical stage corresponded with the ideology of discrimination, the modern stage corresponded with chronology and the structuralist/post-modern stage with order of things. (We can see that Comparative Literature is an assemblage of all these four ideologies.)Foucault raises the question why cant we presume that there are certain thoughts or passions or ideologies behind discourses and answers it that it is because this means imposing present presumptions upon the past, watching the past through the glasses of our ideologies. Again, turning to the scenario of the homeground, we find that this was exactly what happened in the case of criticism of Saint Literature in Marathi. G.B.Sardar saw a methodical social protest in the entire saint literature and acclaimed it for its social achievement (Santawanmayachi Samajik Falashruti), whereas Dalit critics like Gangadhar Pantawane condemned the saint literature, as according to him, it lacked the will and courage to challenge and change the social system which wasthe root-cause of the plight of the masses. Both these divergent judgments were the result of the fallacy mentioned by Foucault. Instead of weighing the past with our present ideologies, Foucault suggests, we should investigate archeologically the scenario of the concerned time and discover the happenings which can be astonishing for todays point of view and try to present the system or ideology behind them. In his most famous book of 1971 entitled Madness and Civilization (A history
of Insanity in the Age of Reason) Foucault has deliberated over different imbalances in the society. He says that these imbalances are basically imbalances of power and these imbalances create knowledge. Foucault takes parallels from the patterns of prison, factory, hospitals and educational institutions and concludes that power domination creates docile bodies. In rather surprising conclusion Foucault claims that, in pre-modern times, the control of power over individual was not total; on the contrary, the freedom of an individual has drastically shrinked in the modern Western culture that vows to nurture individualism. Foucault brings in the example of public execution in pre-modern times and says that, in such social power-exhibition of the establishment, there could have been always a chance to the victim to express his hatred towards the system and the spectators could also participate in that. Consequently, this might have resulted in failure of the intention of creating a threatening impression upon the spectators. This, he claims, led to the idea of prison. The prisons are built, he explains, on the concept of Panopticon, that is, creating a feeling that you are constantly watched and observed. A central pillar is erected around which there are barracks of the prisoners for the purpose. The prisoners are thus constantly under the impression that they are being watched and thus begin self-discipline. The same principle is used in the construction of mental asylums and educational institutions. Comparing the two situations, Foucault infers that it was not possible in any pre-modern societies to control the individuals body through his mind, as is done by bourgeois power-groups in modern times. In accepting it as it is. There are scenes of public execution in Shudrakas Sanskrit play Mrchhakatikam as well as Vijay Ttendulkars Marathi play Ghashiram Kotwal, but none of these contain the elements or atmosphere suggested by Foucault. The public does sympathize with the victims of the execution in both these cases, but the show of hatred towards the system which Foucault has suggested, is totally missing. Even in history chronicles, the brutal public execution of Annaji Datto under the feet of an elephant ordered by Sambhaji and
80
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
later, the brutal public execution of Sambhaji ordered by Aurangjeb have been described without any mention of the expression of hatred towards the system either by Annaji Datto or Sambhaji. Similar difficulty arises in the case of Foucaults description of prisons. Sanskrit Bhagawatapuranam and several narrative epics in Indian languages based on it, like Shreedhars Harivijay in Marathi, describe imprisonment of Vasudev and Devaki in Mathura for decades and many bakhars describe political imprisonments in mountain forts or Shivajis house-arrest in Agra. However, nowhere the panopticon central tower is mentioned. Rather the prisoners are described to have been kept in dark cells (preferably underground) behind seven heavily guarded doors one after the other. The prisoners did not have a constant feeling of being watched all the time and there was no question of selfdiscipline under that mental tension. Vasudev and Devaki gave birth to eight children in the cell though Kansa kept on killing them immediately after birth. Political prisoners in mountain forts engaged themselves in planning conspiracies. There was no self-disciplining under the tension of being watched continuously. Educational institutions in ancient India were Gurukuls away from the public hassles, in a free atmosphere in Nature. Contrary to Foucaults description of mental asylum, mentally imbalanced behavior of spiritually possessed people like Govindaprabhu was the subject of reverence and devotion in medieval India. Hence it is apparent that Foucaults observations are not based on Universal facts. Mind-control system in India and eastern countries was not through panopticon, but through religious construct. Instead of the panopticon, there is the concept of the omnipresence of God, which created the feeling of being watched by the supernatural power all the time. This led to self-discipline not through tension under fear, but as a moral duty. Concepts of Swarga or and Narka or Kayamat created self-discipline with fear, but without tension. Belief in the cycle of birth>death>re-birth monitored behavior of people here.
However, Foucault did present shattering challenges to the established ideas of evaluating criteria of literature. He made us aware that the discourse of literature is one of the discourses originating in the society. He uncovered the fact that there is politics in giving absolute autonomy to literary discourse. Edward Saids entire book Orientalism is based on this awareness. Later, Jacques Derrida put focus on deconstruction, using the same data. He highlighted the possibility of various interpretations due to different modes and designs of deconstruction. Sometimes these possibilities may be contradictory to each other. Let me give you a personal example here, assuring that it is not as superficial as that of the tobacco-addicted boy referred to earlier. Do you remember the fine Marathi film Umbaratha? Smita Patil, in that film, has excellently depicted the mental suffocation and tension of a housewife, who determines to step out of her domestic constraints in order to ascertain her identity. After watching the film, my orthodox elder sister had remarked, Look, how the film has powerfully depicted that it is not proper for a woman to cross the threshold of her house in pursuit of her identity! Now, this is exactly in contrast to the message of the film as most of us conceive it. However, this was her mode of deconstruction and it has its value in its own right. Different readings of a text like the feminist reading, the Marxist reading, the Sociological readings etc. are, in fact, deconstructions of the text in different modes. So are the different uses of myths from the authors point of view. What the post-stucturalists from Roland Barthes to Derrida have explicitly expressed is the plurality of literature and literary interpretations. This has to be understood, debated and testified in the Indian preview, instead of following their discourse blindly and obediently.
81
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
FINDING ECHOES IN LITERARY WORK --Dr Shailaja B. Wadikar School of Lang., Lit. &Cul. Studies S. R. T. Marathwada University, Nanded
The dissatisfaction of the younger generation of poets and critics with biohistorical and subjective literary criticism and the growth of Formalism brought about two important developments on both the sides of the Atlantic. I. A. Richards Principles of Literary Criticism,Science and Poetry, and Practical Criticism; William Empsons Seven Types of Ambiguity, the critical essays of T.S. Eliot, and the essays of F. R. Leavis in his journal Scrutiny ... established Practical Criticism as a theory and method of literary criticism from the 1930s to the 1970s.1 John Crowe Ransoms book titled The New Criticism published in 1941, gave currency to the term New Criticism in America and Europe. So, Practical Criticism is a British term that emphasizes the analysis and interpretation of literature without the reference to any context or author, which is later on termed as New Criticism in America. Like practical criticism, new criticism also stresses the decontextualized objective reading of the text. In the new critics view, literary criticism has nothing to do with social context or literary background of the work or the effects of the work on its readers. It is concerned with the work itself. The work has become the text now. So, the text is allimportant for the critic. New criticism, therefore, relies on the close study of the text as implicit in I.A. Richardss, Ezra Pounds, and T. S. Eliots Objective Criticism. Cleanth Brooks and R. P. Warren collaborated in producing such textbooks of practical criticism as: Understanding Poetry (1938), Understanding Fiction (1943), and Understanding Drama (1945). The other critics, writing in this mode, are Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, William K. Wimsatt, F.R. Leavis, Rene Wellek and Austen Warren. The tenets of the new criticism, in brief, are as follows: A poem is an object of study in itself. It is independent, autonomous, and self-sufficient. The art of poetry is not teleological,i.e. has no practical purpose/ use. In the new criticism, there is no reference to the biography of the author or his social conditions or his ideology. It is because of its critical focus on the literary work in isolation far from the circumstances under which it is written and the effects it produces on its readers, the new criticism may be seen as a type of formalism. What is of prime importance to the new critic is his explication or close reading of the text. The most important feature of the new criticism is that it is basically verbal. It views literary language as a special kind of language, as it is different from the scientific language and the everyday language. The emphasis is on the overall structure of the poem and its organic unity. The two can never be separated: the verbal structure i.e. the form and the meaning i.e. the content of the poem. A poem is, therefore, something unparaphrasable, although it looks paraphrasable. So, Cleanth Brooks calls this semantic phenomenon the heresy of paraphrase. The new criticism does not seem to distinguish between literary genres. In the view of a new critic, there exist tension, irony and paradox in a poem. A poem represents reconciliation of diverse impulses or juxtaposition of heterogeneous and opposite forces. The work has a form which consists essentially in its structure or pattern of meanings. It is characterised by completeness, integrity, and unity. The best examples of the theory and practice of new criticism are found in Cleanth
82
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
Brookss The Well Wrought Urn (1947), W. K. Wimsatts The Verbal Icon (1954), Rene Welleks and Austin Warrens Theory of Literature (1973), Rene Welleks A History of Modern Criticism in six volumes (1986). New Criticism: Background The nature and scope of new criticism can be understood by taking into consideration the brief outline of the development of the English critical tradition. It is observed that foundation of the Western literary criticism lies in the writings of classical critics like Aristotle, Horace, and Longinus. Aristotles Poetics is considered the greatest treatise in the field of drama, poetry, and criticism. Aristotle wrote it with two intentions: (a) for giving principles as guidelines for the construction of a play; (b) for his own understanding and appreciation of existing Greek plays. In that sense, Poetics is partly theoretical and partly applied. Similarly, Horaces Ars Poetica is also pragmatic in its aim. In it, there are rules for the apprentice dramatists and poets which Horace lays down as a series of dos and donts. Still, it is not considered theoretical in its orientation. On the Sublime by Longinus is actually a magnificent piece of applied or practical criticism which later on came to be regarded as the old version of the new criticism. Here the pieces of Greek poetry and drama are examined on the basis of diction, imagery, verse movement, and tone. The readers attention is kept centred on the stylistic features of the chosen passage. The analysis of the sublime -- be it imagery, metaphor, or any such rhetorical figure-anticipates the modern critics close analysis of poems. The sublime, according to Longinus, lies in excellence and distinction of expression from the common one. Here, he seems to demand, like the stylistic critics, deviations from the norms of regular grammar and usage. Similarly, he appears to think that poetical devices are valued only in terms of their function in a work.2 The fundamental questions in literary criticism are: (a) What is the nature of a literary representation? (2) What is its function? Literary criticism enables us to
examine thoroughly the structure/form of a work of art in terms of its constituent parts so that it will be totally an objective interpretation. Aristotle anticipates the same in his analysis of tragedy. Following the historical approach, we see that the major critics in English literary criticism are Sidney, Dryden, Dr. Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, Eliot, and Leavis. In the evaluation of a work of art, the poet or the writer is placed in his times and attention is given to the state of the English language at the time of his/ her writing. Notable examples are found in Sidneys examination of Spenser, Drydens and Arnolds estimates of Chaucer, and Dr. Johnsons criticism of Shakespeare. Another major trend in English literary criticism is bio-literary approach. Here, the personality of the poet is taken into consideration and his/her achievements are related to his intellectual development and character. Famous example of it is Dr. Johnsons Lives of the Poets (1779-81). T. S. Eliot, a classicist, is obviously a great opponent of romanticism. In Tradition and Individual Talent he states, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.3 Coleridges comments in his lectures on Shakespeare and his scrutiny of Wordsworths poetic theory and practice in Biographia Literaria (1817) the chapters XIX, XX, and XXII of the book are the best examples of applied criticism. While commenting on Wordsworths unique use of the English language, he reveals Wordworths mastery of the language, particularly in the use of different stylistic features. Too much emphasis on the biographical criticism in the late Victorian period (e. g. Matthew Arnolds critical estimates of the English poets from Chaucer onwards) led to the emergence of practical criticism in the 20th century. This movement opposed itself against the prevailing interest of the scholars and the critics of that era with the biographies of authors, the social context of literature and literary history by insisting
83
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
that the proper concern of literary criticism is not with the external circumstances or the effects of a work, but with a detailed consideration of the work itself.4 T. S. Eliots theory of impersonality, which is considered to be his greatest contribution to the field of poetry and criticism, marks the beginning of the new or practical criticism. He emphasises the autonomy of the work of art in his famous essay Tradition and Individual Talent. In Eliots words, Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality....5 In another famous phrase from his essay on Hamlet (1919), he describes the work of art as an objective correlative for the experience which may have engendered it-- an impersonal re-creation which is the autonomous object of attention. In other words, it is the only way of expressing emotion through a set of objects, a chain of events, a situation as a formula.6 The other names associated with this approach are Ezra Pound, I. A. Richards, William Empson, and F.R. Leavis. A poem or a piece of writing, in Richardss view, stands all by itself. His approach to literature is based on the experiments, he did in Cambridge. He used to give an unsigned poem to the undergraduate students and invite their uninhibited and unconditioned responses. Thus, the focus of his approach is on recording of what happened to a reader while reading poetry. A poem is, no doubt, a response of the poet to an object or situation. It throws light on his/her state of mind. However, the poem also has its inclusive or ironical structure, which is realised by analysing language, imagery, and rhythm. The extension of Richardss work is noticed in William Empson, especially in his books-- Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) and The Structure of Complex Words. His emphasis in the analysis of poetry is on its ambiguity. According to him, it is due to ambiguity that there are several reactions to the same piece. As the stress is on the
ambiguous language, Empson concentrates his attention on the diction and imagery. In his analysis of a poem, Empson has tried to look for double or contradictory meanings. The best example of it is his interpretation of Shakespeares Sonnet No. 83. However, there is a slight difference in Empsons method and that of Richards. Richardss approach is empirical. And for this experimental method, the readers response is the foundation. But Empson is not interested in the readers psychology but in the context in which the word occurs. Connotations, for him, are more important than denotations. So, he thinks that the reader, while he is reading a poem, has to pay attention to the context rather than to the lexical meaning. In short, both, Richards and Empson pay attention to the readers response in terms of meaning, but from different angles. For Richards, in the interpretation of a poem, the psychology of the reader is important and for Empson, the connotation of the diction is important. F.R. Leavis, through his journal Scrutiny (1932-53), made remarkable contribution to the practical/applied criticism. One of the columns of this journal consisted of his interpretation of the passages from English literature. This experimental analysis of innumerable passages brought the practical criticism to a great degree of refinement. Criticism, in Leaviss view, should not be regarded as a method of neutral literary or rhetorical analysis. It must enable the reader to distinguish between a vital and a slovenly piece of literature. A successful poem, for him, is one, in which there is an integration of imagery, movement, and attitudes into a single complex whole. Through his analysis, the reader has to give his estimate of whether a writer has cast his thought in the concrete, felt terms or has merely left it as an abstraction. In his analysis of some of the passages from Macbeth, in his work The Living Principle, he brings to the readers notice the efficacy of the practical criticism not only as a method of literary analysis, but as a tool of judgement. However, Leaviss approach to literature is not that of a rhetorical critic. For him, literature is a powerful weapon for effecting a moral change in society. So, being
84
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
a moralist, poets have to be sincere and the object of practical criticism is to examine whether the poet has successfully attained the technique of sincerity. What one can observe in Leaviss critical work is his literary sensibility, capacity for intense concentration, commitment to local textual analysis, and an inclusive morality. It is due to his influence, practical criticism has come to be regarded as close analysis. 7 The new trend in criticism has been noticed since the 1920s in Britain and since the 1930s in America. The critics revolted against the existing philological approach, which is based on the historical study of language. There was an emphatic demand to study the poem as a poem or literature as literature. This new movement came to be regarded as New Criticism which includes such critics as J.C. Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and R.P. Warren. All these New Critics sought precision and structural tightness in the literary work; they favoured a style and tone that tended towards irony; they insisted on the presence within the work of everything necessary for its analysis and they called for an end to a concern by critics and teachers of English with matters outside the work itself-- the life of the author, the history of his or her times, or the social and economic implications of the literary work.8 Their wellknown books mentioned earlier -Understanding Poetry (1938), Understanding Fiction (1943), Understanding Drama (1945), and Well Wrought Urn (1947) -- comprise an analysis of a number of passages and works. The method that is adopted for analysis is a question-and-answer method, where students are stimulated to give answers on their own instead of relying on the information from a poets biography or the history of literature. They have to analyse the feelings and emotions of a poem through the diction, the imagery, the verse movement, etc. all of which impart meaning to a literary piece. The students are also asked to find out the presence of ambiguity, irony, tension, paradox, etc. in a given literary work. Well Wrought Urn comprises Brookss sustained study of wellknown poems from Donnes Canonization to Yeatss Among School Children. In his
book titled Understanding Poetry, written in collaboration with R.P. Warren, he has given the techniques of the new criticism to be used in the class-rooms for the interpretation and appreciation of poetry. It is for this reason that he has been described as the systematizer and technician of the New Criticism.9 Rene Wellek is quite justified, when he says: He (Cleanth Brooks) has his own personal theory. He has taken the terminology of Richards, deprived it of its psychologists presuppositions, and transformed it into a remarkable, clear system. It allows him to analyse poems as structures of tensions: in practice, of paradoxes and ironies.10 Approach and Interpretation According to the new critics, in the interpretation of literature, the focus should be neither on the writer nor on the reader but on the words on the page. If the focus is on the writer, the result is intentional fallacy and if it is on the reader, the result is affective fallacy. As the literary work is autonomous and self sufficient, the reader should not go outside the text for its interpretation. Interpretation of Poetry The steps that are followed in the interpretation of a poem are as follows: Read the poem carefully several times. Note carefully the poems title and its relationship to the main argument. Study the diction in the light of denotations and connotations; try to find out the etymological roots of the words, wherever necessary. Examine all allusions with reference to the primary text or source. Analyse the images, symbols, tropes, etc. and examine their relationships. Analyse the structural pattern of the lines/ stanzas. Consider such elements as tone, theme, attitude, perspective etc. related to the dramatic situation. Note the tensions, ambiguities, or paradoxes and study their interrelationships. Narrate how the poem achieves its dominant effect. Living in Sin
85
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
The teacher can ask the students to analyse the poem with regard to its imagery, diction, syntax, and rhythm. Using this analysis, the students can arrive at an interpretation of the poem. She had thought the studio would keep itself; no dust upon the furniture of love. Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal, the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears, a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat 5 stalking the picturesque amusing mouse had risen at his urging. Not that at five each separate stair would writhe under the milkmans tramp; that morning light so coldly would delineate the scraps 10 of last nights cheese and three sepulchral bottles; that on the kitchen shelf among the saucers a pair of beetle-eyes would fix her own-envoy from some village in the moldings... Meanwhile, he, with a yawn, 15 sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard, declared it out of tune, shrugged at the mirror, rubbed at his beard, went out for cigarettes; while she, jeered by the minor demons, pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found 20 a towel to dust the table-top, and let the coffee-pot boil over on the stove. By evening she was back in love again, though not so wholly but throughout the night she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming 25 like a relentless milkman up the stairs. --Adrienne Rich
(Mcmahan, Elizabeth, Susan X Day, Robert Funk(eds.). Literature and the Writing Process. V edition. U. S. A.: Prentice Hall, 1999, 614.) Imagery: The kind of imagery, a poet or a writer uses, depends on the age to which he/she belongs. The 20th century is the age in which the two world wars broke out. It has faced uncertainties that accompany crises. People have faced anxieties and tensions which are reflected in the literature of the age. In this age, poetry has become more prosaic and so has its imagery. The present poem Living in Sin is no exception to it. Adrienne Rich is a feminist criticpoet. In the present poem, she depicts the helpless condition of women in maledominated society where women are simply taken for granted. She throws light on the burning fact that still in the later half of the 20th century, where everyone has the right to enjoy independence, women are used just either as stepping stones or as slaves to their male-counterparts, satisfying and fulfilling their needs. The poem creates a visual picture of the house of a lady. The important images in the poem are the studio, the furniture of love, taps less vocal , panes relived of grime, a piano, a cat, a mouse, and the title itself Living in Sin. The sensuous imagery is reinforced by such phrases as the studio and furniture of love. The studio seems to stand for the heart of the lady. She wishes that her heart and mind should be pure, sacred, untroubled by dirt. But all her expectations are futile and useless. She is totally helpless and has to submit herself to the mans passion or lust, and, that too, against her wishes. The feeling of love has been reduced to furniture which is full of dust. Love for her is lifeless as her companion has forgotten that she also has her individual personality and identity. The studio is bound to gather dust. The lady desires that her studio should be calm, clean, and placid where even the taps should be less vocal and window-panes should be relieved of grime. However, the same thing happens with the panes as with the furniture.
86
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
The panes, too, are bound to collect dirt, dewdrops, etc. They are symbolic as they indicate the life of the lady where everything is quite vague, unclear, and uncertain. The most important images are- the mouse and the cat and their game. The game symbolizes the kind of life that is going on in that studio and the relationship that exists between the lady and the man. The cat stands for the male-companion and the mouse for the protagonist, that is, the lady. A kind of hide and seek game is going on where a cats, stalking remains successful in capturing the prey. The lady is as helpless as the mouse and, therefore, remains in the clutches of her unwanted but unavoidable male-companion of night. Thus, the first eight lines illustrate the relationship that exists between the lady and the man. In the beginning, she thinks positively. When the man asks her to come, she has the vision of a plate of pears, a piano with a Persian shawl. But what she faces in reality is the vision of writhing of stairs under the milkmans tramp, early in the morning. In short, the things do not turn up according to her expectations. The cheese and sepulchral bottles indicate the repeated nightly actions of the companions. The next two lines, i.e. 14 and 15 give us the feeling that there is another woman in the kitchen. She has beetle-eyes and is watching the lady. Maybe, she is from some black village and is envious of the lady. The mans action of checking the piano- whistling shows his boredom, carelessness and indifference to the ladys feelings and emotions. He thinks that she is bound to satisfy him. With a yawn he wakes up, plays the piano and declares it out of tune. Specting his beard, he goes out for cigarettes. Here, the piano also seems to stand for the lady. The lady, for the man, is a plaything. And this piano, for him, is out of tune. A fallen towel to dust the table top indicates the ladys futile efforts to clean her studio and furniture of love. Meanwhile, with the return of the man, she comes to know of the reality and once again she is back in love though not wholly but all through the night, waiting for
the milkmans tramp that represents the monotony of our present, everyday life. Thus, the images used in the poem are not only complex but at times complicated also. They refer to the illicit relationship shared by the protagonist with the man. The very title of the poem is highly symbolic in nature. The man and the lady are living in sin as their relationship is based not on love but on mere physical attraction. The lady wishes to maintain secrecy in the relationship. That is why she wishes the taps less vocal. The poem can be divided into three parts. The first part symbolizes her optimism, as the lady expects no dust upon the furniture of love, a plate of pears and a piano with a Persian shawl. The second part depicts the fact, that is, the mans indifference to the ladys emotional involvement in their relationship. The piano that he declares out of tune actually throws light on their extramarital relationship which is out of harmony. The resultant effect is, naturally, of depression. The life, projected here, is essentially illogical, irrational and absurd. The last part of the poem indicates the no-escaperoute or the dead end of the ladys journey. She has a towel to dust the table-top, and by evening she was back in love again. The lady has no alternative but to continue living in sin. It seems that the poem might have been written during the second half of the twentieth century, when under the impact of World Wars, people were less concerned about the moral values. In that sense, the poem throws light on the absurd, illogical, irrational life devoid of values in the aftermath of the World Wars. The lack seems to have continued till today. Diction: The epithets used have quite a grim connotation. For example, the less vocal taps, furniture with dust a piano out of tune, last nights cheese sepulchral bottles. All of them have negative connotations. The less vocal taps is an expression that indirectly brings to the notice the uselessness of female expectations in male-dominated society. Furniture of love and full of dust connote that women are always taken for granted even
87
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
in personal matter such as love. So, the furniture is full of dust, suggesting that everything goes against her expectation. The phrase the last nights cheese and sepulchral bottles connotes that the ladys life is similar to them, rather ragged, useless and scattered and her body is like an empty tomb. She is alive just in her shadow-like existence. The verbs used are dynamic, depicting some kind of action. For example, relieved of, stalking shrugged, went out, to dust, was in love again. These verbs seem to have a negative meaning attached to them. They indicate the fruitless expectations of the lady and her cunning companions indifference to her emotions. The diction used is formal. There are no contractions, no dialectal terms, and no colloquial expressions. The words used are simple. Some of them are long, having four syllables, such as picturesque, companion, delineate; some have three syllables, such as relentless, furniture, contending; majority of them have two syllables, such as milkman, granted, sounded, pleaded moulding, throughout, etc. And some of the words are monosyllabic, for example, love, dust, keep, etc. Suffixes such as-less as in relentless, -ian as in Persian, -ly as in coldly, etc., are used. Poetic license is not used. The picture depicted is realistic in nature. Syntax: The poem consists of 26 lines. A full stop is used four times, after second, in the middle of the fourth, after the seventh, and at the end of the last line. In the third, fifth, fifteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth, a comma is used in the middle. An apostrophe is used two times (i.e. in the words milkmans, nights). Dash (-) is used at the end of the thirteenth line and a semi- colon is used three times, viz. after the first, the eleventh, and the eighteenth line. The poem is not divided into stanzas and looks like a unified whole. Rhythm: The poem is in blank verse, that is, an unrhymed iambic pentameter verse as each line consists of ten syllables (five feet) and in
the lines, the unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed one. The General Interpretation: The poem Living in Sin depicts the life of two persons, living together but a separate life. From the title, it is noticed that they are not husband and wife. The situation depicted appears to be an imposed one on the lady. They seem to be young, and they may continue to live the same type of life, but know well that their worlds have to be separate mentally rather than physically. The title itself is very apt. The diction used in the poem and the situation projected indirectly throw light on the kind of life in the twentieth century. It is the age of two world wars-- spreading frustration, corruption everywhere. Poverty, unemployment, and loss of the means of livelihood are the major problems that the people have been facing. Another problem is that women are always taken for granted in a male-dominated society. From the description, it appears, the poem depicts an upper middle class lady, leading a solitary life. Due to the monotonous life, she is frustrated and sad at heart, but life moves on and her nights companion remains careless about it. Such phrases asshrugged at the mirror, went out for cigarettes indicate his carelessness. The phrase rubbed at his beard points out the daily routine of the mates and relentless milkman describes the tedious life of the companions. Last nights cheese and sepulchral bottles throw light on their nightly activities where she has to help herself with drink to submit to her male-counterpart. The line - she was back in love again though not so wholly but throughout the night brings the realisation that she is taken for granted and compelled to submit herself to the man physically. Although the poem is pessimistic in tone, the hope gleams through intermittently. Everything goes against her expectations. Still she desires, there should be no dust upon her furniture of love. That is why she goes on dusting the table top with a towel. The diction used reinforces the meaninglessness, the uselessness of her stereotyped existence. The piano is out of use.
88
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
So, it is covered with a Persian shawl; a plate of pears is put just for decoration. A cat stalking the picturesque amusing mouse shows the imposed state that she has to face during the night hours, though rather unwillingly. Nightly affair becomes boredom as both of them get involved just physically, but not emotionally. Ultimately, both of them remain unsatisfied with their loveless state. Reading the poem one is reminded of what Adela Quested, in E. M. Forsters novel A Passage to India thinks: Physical union without love is rape. The long lines of the poem are suggestive of the monotony, the relentless repetition of the same routine, everyday boredom. The poem, thus, reflects the frustration of the lady, who is taken for granted, along with the boredom of the postmodern life which is mechanical, monotonous, unfeeling, and devoid of any moral and spiritual force. It is observed that in formalist approach to literature, the emphasis is laid on the analysis of form or structure. In new or practical criticism, meaning is also considered of prime importance along with the form. A poem, for Empson, is ambiguous; for Allen Tate, the real strength of a poem lies in its tension. Cleanth Brookss Understanding Poetry in collaboration with R. P. Warren is a milestone since it comprises the techniques of new criticism to be used in the classroom. Thus, in the new critical approach, the technique of interpretation of literature, formed on the basis of diction, imagery, paradox, irony, verse movement, etc. has got a sound foundation as it becomes concrete due to its experiments with the students. The abstract form of criticism in the formalist approach is rendered into a physical one in new criticism. References: 1. Krishnaswami, N., John Varghese, Sunita Mishra. Anglo American Practical/ New Criticism. Contemporary Literary Theory: A Student's Companion. Mumbai: Macmillan, 2001, 113.
2. Seturaman, V.S., C.T. Indra, T. Sriraman. (eds.) Introduction. Practical Criticism. Mumbai: Macmillan, 1990, 8. 3. Eliot, T. S. Tradition and Individual Talent. S. Ramaswami and V. S. Sethuraman (eds). The English Critical Tradition: An Anthology of English Literary Criticism. Vol.2. New Delhi: Macmillan, 2007,172. 4. Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. VI edition. Bangalore: Prism, 1993, 246. 5. Eliot, T. S.op. cit.,175. 6. Eliot, T. S. Hamlet. Selected Essays by T. S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 1980,145. 7. Seturaman, op. cit., 18. 8. Guerin, Wilfred, L., Earle Labor, Lee Morgan, J.C. Reesman, J.R. Willingham. A. Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. V edition. New Delhi: Oxford, 2007, 101. 9. Das, B.K. Basic Tenets of New Criticism. Twentieth Century Literary Criticism. V edition. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2005, 29-30. 10. Wellek, Rene. Literary Criticism. Leonard, S. Klein (ed). Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century. Vol. III. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1983, 122.
89
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
Re-Inventing the Metaphor: Women in the Narratives of Partition

--Mithun Chakrovarty SDM College, Ujjire, (KA)
I
The departure of the British from India in August 1947 was accompanied by a bloody Partition in which it is estimated that one million people perished and over ten million displaced. The elation of freedom, on the one hand, and a deep sense of anguish over the Partition riots, on the other, left the consciousness of writers deeply troubled and created an ambiguous tension that provided ample opportunity to transmute the raw experience into literary art. An exhaustive body of Partition literature has been generated in the six decades following the historical event. Women were arguably the worst victims of the Partition of India in 1947 and endured displacement, violence, abduction, prostitution, mutilation, and rape. However, on reading histories of the division of India, one finds that the life-stories of women are often elided, and that there is an unwillingness to address the atrocities of 1947. 1 This reticence results partly from the desires of the Indian and Pakistani governments to portray the events as freak occurrences with no place in their modern nations. Literature can play an important role in interrupting state-managed histories and reading Partition narratives written by women writers unsettles official versions of Partition. They examine how the narratives act as a counterpoint to national accounts of 1947 through their depiction of the gendered nature of much of the violence. The process of recognising and addressing the cultivated silence in historiography started in the year 1993 with the publication of articles by Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin as project to recover womens voices. This process of exceptional research culminated in the publication of path breaking documentary narratives like Veena Dass Critical Events (1994); Urvashi Butalias The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (1998) and Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasins Borders and Boundaries: Women in Indias Partition. These feminist studies on Partition attempted to collect and make sense of the testimonies of people who lived through these events drawing upon oral histories and official records. The entire process
laid the groundwork for more extended discussions on the nature of sectarian violence, constructions of community and state identities at the time of Partition. 2 This paper focuses on the period 19802000, the last two decades of the twentieth century, and attempts to understand the particular circumstances in which there was a spectacular effusion of Partition fiction by women writers during this period. The fictional output of women writers up to this point is rather meagre, despite the fact that women suffered the trauma of Partition in an intense way. This includes the first novel by a woman writer, The Heart Divided by Mumtaz Shah Nawaz, which appeared in 1957 (though it was written much earlier), 3 and Attia Hosains Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961). It is with the 1980s that we see substantial additions to the tradition of Partition fiction by women writers. The texts published during this period include Anita Desais Clear Light of Day (1980), Mehr Nigar Masroors Shadows of Time (1987), Bapsi Sidhwas Ice-Candy-Man (1988), Jyotiromoyee Devis original Bangla novel of the 1960s translated into English as The River Churning (1995), Shauna Singh Baldwins What the Body Remembers (1999), and Meena Arora Nayaks About Daddy (2000). I have chosen fictional narratives in English and in translation (Bengali), both being considered for the purposes of this study as fiction written in English. The specific focus of the paper will be on Bapsi Sidhwas Ice-CandyMan (1989) and Jyotirmoyee Devis The River Churning (1995), the former delineating the experience of Partition on the western borders of India and the latter as a response that fictionalises the experience of Partition along the eastern borders of the country. At the same time, the study derives some of its tools and insights from the oral testimonial project for the recovery of womens voices seen in the documentary narratives mentioned above. These texts are framed within the tradition of Partition fiction, with Mumtaz Shah Nawazs The Heart Divided (1957) and Attia Hosains Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961), providing the fictional
90
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
precedents, while Anita Desais Clear Light of Day (1980) and Meena Arora Nayaks About Daddy (2000) provide useful points of comparison as successor texts. This kind of analysis would help locate the chosen texts within their times and help in drawing out a female tradition of fictional writing on the Partition. There is a generational shift that is clearly evident over the decades among women writers of Partition fiction. Texts that appeared from the decades of 1947 to 1980 form the ones of first generation writers and those that appeared after the decade of 1980 till the recent present are categorised as texts of second generation writers in this paper. This kind of a division is made for the purpose of convenience in understanding the texts and the writers more comprehensively. This enables to understand the response of women writers to Partition in two different time frames, the zeitroman sensed by individual writer in different milieu. Some texts were the immediate response of writers and some others were written after thoughtful endeavour. II The first generation writers like Mumtaz Shah Nawaz (1912-1948) and Attia Hosains (1913-1998) novels besides focusing largely on the description of the feudalistic character of their contemporary times, do not move further than just portraying the struggle of their protagonists in emancipating themselves from the clutches of feudal and patriarchal ethos. 4 They narrate largely about the nation building process of the 1930 and 40s, the rapid deterioration in Hindu-Muslim relationships, triangle of the Congress, the League and the British. Both Shah Nawaz and Hosain do not deal with the Partition as a central theme in their novels. 5 However, Mumtaz Shah Nawaz and Hosain laid foundation steps to see Partition from womens perspective through their woman protagonist narrators, Zohra and Laila respectively. Depicting the ways in which the lives of women in a feudal Muslim family were circumscribed, confined to the zenana and purdah, their protagonists are caught between the desire to break free of traditional norms and their sense of duty, as daughters, to uphold familys honor and respect. The narrator-heroines of the
novels are only passive observers of the political drama with little agency to be active. 6 Jyotirmoyee Devis 7 The River Churning 8 is set in and around Calcutta dealing with the Hindu patriarchy, a critique from the Indian inside. It deals with the story of Sutara Dutta, a young Hindu girl who is orphaned by Partition violence and is protected by a Muslim family of the neighbourhood during the time of the pre-partition riots in a village called Bamunpara in Bengal. Though Sutara is returned to her extended family in Calcutta, her relatives shun her. This girl has not been molested, but all the same she stands condemned and abandoned as a social outcaste, is left to her own resources and placed outside all relationships. Undeterred by all the odds, she studies in a missionary school and becomes empowered. Even then the prospect of her marriage demands her to prove her past like Sita. The novel ends with a proposal from the foreign returned Promode who is ready to debate with his mother about marrying Sutara. The brief introduction as well as the sub - titles of three sections in the novel claims a kinship with the epic narratives and myths. The references to Sita, Draupadi and to other women in the epics, who were abandoned, rejected or exiled, comment on the continuity of brutality as well as on the falsity of vesting purity in a womans body and her moving beyond the confines of a defined space. Devi speaks vehemently about the side-lining of Stree Parva in Mahabharata focussing on womens absent histories. She draws a parallel between the gaps in the Mahabharata regarding womens history and the gaps in accounts of women separated from their male relatives during Partition. Interestingly, Devi names the final section of her novel as Stree Parva. 9 The conviction that no girl is one of us as far as men are concerned is angrily expressed by Sakinas mother, a Muslim woman sheltering a Hindu girl in the communal riots of Partition. She says to her sons: You want to partition the country, go ahead, go ahead; you want to fight over it-do it by all means. But why dont you leave the women alone? 10 Jill Didur, a Canadian scholar on Partition wonders about the surprising gap in the narrative. Didur observes that Sutara's experiences during the riots are not represented in the novel which is so flourishingly evident in
91
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
the testimonies of abducted women collected by scholars like Butalia, Das, Menon and Bhasin. 11 In other words, the protagonist in the novel is not placed at the actual riot of Partition. No one is interested in knowing what happened to her during the riot. Suspicion lingers in everyones mind to avoid her. The novel ends with a hope of Sutaras marriage, in spite of all odds. III In his introduction to the revised 1988 translation of Bisham Sahnis novel of the Indian Partition, Tamas, Govind Nihalani writes: A traumatic historical event usually finds the artistic/literary response twice. Once, during the event or immediately following it, and again after a lapse of time, when the event has found its corner in the collective memory of the generation that witnessed it. The initial response tends to be emotionally intense and personal in character, even melodramatic. On the other hand, when the event is reflected upon with emotional detachment and objectivity, a clearer pattern of the various forces that shaped it is likely to emerge. 12 Etched in the same line of argument, Sukeshi Kamra quotes Aijaz Ahmad who notes that the first novels on the Partition tended to be raw narratives of the suffering itself, in a somewhat naturalistic manner, so as to preserve the memory of the brute facts of the attendant ethical collapse, whereas later novels tended to be more reflective, seeking to negotiate some larger civilizational, social or political questions.13 With the decade of 1980s, there is a spectacular addition to the tradition of Partition fiction by women writers. 14 The 1980s began on a promising note for Indian fiction in English in terms of what Meenakshi Mukherjee has called the upsurge of the eighties, 15 with the publication of Rushdies Midnights Children in 1981. This was also the decade when the Subaltern Studies Project took off (1982), and the anti-Sikh riots (1984) provided a gruesome flashback to the days of the Partition. The increasing communalisation of Indian society also kept the memories of Partition alive, culminating in the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. 16 The celebration of fifty years of Indian independence in 1997 provided an ironic counterpoint to the Partition 17 and also a tremendous fillip to Partition fiction by women writers.
Just as much of the history of modern-day India has been a male-gendered enterprise, so has most of the writing, whether political, academic, or representational, displayed a masculinist bias by failing to address women's agency. The 1980s and 1990s are heir to the major political developments of the 1970s, including the imposition of political emergency in India in 1975, which was also the U. N. International Year of Women that extended into the U. N. International Decade for Women up to 1985. In the same year, 1975, the publication of the Report of the Commission on Women, Towards Equality, revealed the prevalence of deep sociocultural prejudices against women in India. As a second generation novel, Anita Desais Clear Light of Day came in 1980 exploring the role of memory in keeping old wounds alive. Set in Old Delhi in the 1970s, the novel tells the story of a middle-class Hindu Das family, paralleling their past estrangements to the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. In Clear Light of Day, the theme of Partition works only at the backdrop of the story where the main issue becomes the emancipation of women from patriarchal hold. 18 Desais story like Hosains novel is a personal document where Partition is only a distant nightmare. The fires are beyond the city walls, so far outside the city and Bims sheltered life tells her that it was really rather improbable and she told herself she only imagined it. 19 Distance from the Partition experience is seen apparently in Clear Light of Day. Bapsi Sidhwas 20 Ice-Candy-Man (1988) 21 is set in Lahore dealing more with the Muslim ambience of Partition in Pakistan. The story of Ice-Candy-Man centres on Lenny, a polio stricken Parsi child through whose eyes the story unfolds. Lenny is protected and taken care of by Ayah, whose real name is Shanti, a Hindu maidservant of the family. Through the agency of Ayah, Lenny experiences the outer world. A throng of admirers from all religions surround Ayah, like moths around a lamp. But when Lahore starts burning of religious riots, everyone becomes conscious of their religion. Ayahs plan to elope with Dil-Nawaz fails. The men, jealous of her attraction to him, form a mob and march to the Parsi house demanding to know why they, the Parsis, are sheltering a Hindu. Their Muslim cook emerges trying to protect her. But the mob manages to trick little Lenny into blurting out that Ayah is hidden in the bathroom. They drag
92
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
her out, presumably to be raped and/or butchered. Thus Ayah is dumped after use as a whore in Hira Mandi. Later the Godmother saves her and sends across the Wagah border to India. Rada Ivekovic and Julie Mostovs book From Gender to Nation (2006), comments on the gender agenda of nation-building exercise centering on womens sexuality. Rada and Julie write in their Introduction to this volume: Gender identities and womens bodies become symbolic and spatial boundaries of the nation. Womens bodies serve as symbols of the fecundity of the nation and vessels for its reproduction, as well as territorial markers. Mothers, wives, and daughters designate the space of the nation and are, at the same time, the property of the nation. 22 From Gender to Nation of Rada critique the way in which narratives of nationhood and womanhood naturalise and essentialise difference and hierarchy. Men rape and torture the women of the enemy country as a means of controlling the other. During the communal riots of Partition, womens body became the site on which men wrote their most urgent narratives of community and the nation. Women from the enemy group were mutilated and inscribed to show their men that the enemy had claimed their most precious possession. The bodies of the women were then the signs on which the violent dialogue between men was conducted. Ayah in Ice-Candy-Man becomes a target from both the communities to establish each others stamp. Ananya Jahanara Kabir, a woman Partition scholar allegorically terms Sidhwa as one of the Midnights Children generation because she was a writer who while not born in August 1947 was but a child at that moment. 23 The fictional details in the novel and the actual descriptions Sidhwa has recounted about her house and surroundings to various interviewers 24 over a vast span of time are in many ways identical. This coincides with Paul Cobleys statement that ......narrative is used not only to record fictional events but also to record events that actually happened 25 Bapsi Sidhwa tells in one of her interviews to Alok Bhalla Women were literally sold like vegetables in the streets of Punjab for ten-twenty rupees. One cannot even imagine their physical and mental
state. Men used to go down the streets with captive women, shouting woman for Sale, woman for Sale! 26 As a token of revenge politics, Ayah is raped by erstwhile Muslim admirers and friends. The Ayah can be seen as a symbol of the Indian earth and the titular Ice Candy Man as the ravisher, a symbol of the many conquerors of India. She is raped in retaliation for the trainloads of dead Muslims and bags full of the breasts of Muslim women cut off by Hindu men. The Ayah who had fearlessly walked around Lahore with Lenny in tow is now confined to the enclosures of the Prostitutes Quarters in Lahore and becomes what Lennys male cousin calls the opposite of the Virgin Mary a whore. Sidhwa doesnt succumb to award her women characters to be complete victims in her narrative. Lennys mother and grandmother try to rehabilitate other whores like Hamida, Lennys new Ayah, women who had become untouchables because their husbands did not like the idea of accepting back the wives. 27 Better-placed women, like Lennys mother, were busy rescuing such women on both sides of the new borders. A sense of rehabilitating the victims runs throughout the novel. The narrator girl, Lenny is a true subaltern since she is lame, a Parsi, a girl and a child. Sidhwas adoption unprecedented in the context of Partition literature of a marginal point of view that of a Parsi girl who looks at reality with the immediacy and absence of prejudice typical of childhood has enabled Sidhwa to tell her story with greater impartiality and to treat the problematic question of womens rape and abduction from a gendered perspective. However, though Sidhwa emphasizes the vulnerability of women, like almost all who write on the Partition; Sidhwa is different in her refusal to make women only victims. Ayah has survived and rescued by the Godmother. Ice-candy-Man is a particularly inflected post-colonial fictional account of the Partition. It shows feminist frameworks through which the traumas of communal violence may be addressed. It does so by erasing the distinction between literary work and critical social history, producing what we may term counter-histories of the Partition of India. A girl upon the verge of sexual maturation sees the eruption of violence in the society around her to
93
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
be fundamentally analogous to the inherent violence that accompanies the new social role she is being thrust into as a woman. This is achieved through the presentation of the narrative from the characters naive perspective. Kamran Rastegar reads Ice-candy-Man through this technique of characters naive perspective.28 This literary strategy in the text links the political, often nationalist violence of these stories to the intimate violence sustaining the structures of patriarchal social institutions within which the characters exist. About Daddy of Meena Arora Nayak came in 2000. It is the story of Simran Mehta, a daughter finding the violent roots of her father recounting the torture, suffering, grief and humiliation of Partition. It is Simran Mehta, the daughters harrowing journey into her father Manohar Mehtas past. It is also an examination of the legacy of distrust and communal strife that continues to haunt India even sixty three years after the Partition. The plot of Nayaks novel hinges on the ordeals of a young American tourist who is in India at the Wagah border to fulfil her fathers last wish and scatter his ashes there in absolution of his guilt following the role he had played during Partition. The idea of guilt of Partition descending down the generations is a new one for Partition fiction, but the associations are rather far-fetched, and the author seems to be more intent on spinning her story around notions of contemporary politics for an international audience. 29 Fulfilling her fathers last wish, Simran, an American of Indian origin is at the Wagah border between India and Pakistan, sprinkling his ashes on the line of demarcation the wound her father helped inflict. Daddy had asked his daughter Dont cremate me in IndiaI cannot ask her to bear the weight of my pyre. I have taken from her enough. But sprinkle my ashes on the border so that my soul can feel the wound I helped inflict as long as it bleeds. 30 Totally unprepared for the attitude of Indian officials towards foreigners, she finds herself in prison on charges of espionage. With the help of her American fianc Scott, and a local journalist Arun, Simran is able to get out of jail, but is forced to go underground. Hiding from the police and immigration officials, she joins a peace organization where she meets Kalida, whose actions seem to epitomize Simrans desire
to bring peace between communities. The novel seems to say that the chaotic contemporary politics of today is a continuation of the legacy of 1947 Partition holocaust. Arun and Scott try to convince Simran that there is no essential relation between her fathers deeds before Partition and the politics today. As the plot unfolds, her fathers story becomes Simrans own as she begins to realize the complexity of a culture in which there are no simple principles of crime and punishment, guilt and innocence, oppression and submission. The title of the novel itself signifies memory. It is about Daddy. For Partition writers this memory has not been a pleasant one. The whole generation of Partition fiction testifies this. One of the characters Kurban Bhai of the short story Partition says What rotten stuff do you teach in the name of history? You were saying partition happened. Dont talk in the past tense. Its not over yet. Its happening each moment, each hour. 31 It is this truth that the novel About Daddy seems to project. Rape and other violently sexual crimes have operated as group resources for achieving masculinity. Sultana wants to forget the rape committed on her by a group of five policemen than register a complaint. Daddy has recounted to her daughter Sultana his heroic deeds during communal riots in India. Sultana narrates it vividly. Daddy watches an old woman fully naked with legs full of blood during communal riot at Nanowal. He sees small daughters crying over their mothers bloody corpses on the streets. Simran recounts that her Daddy was always guilty that he perpetrated the Partition of India and Pakistan. Simran too cherishes the same feeling. She starts thinking that every contemporary happenings of India have the roots in her fathers actions. The demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, made Daddy anxious and at his deathbed he takes a promise from his daughter to spread his ashes on the border as his last wish. Simrans repeated pleas to the magistrate that she is just an American tourist and the tiny box she was carrying contained her fathers ashes and not bomb, falls on deaf ears. Simran had to comply with the rules. Simran realizes how her father an innocent boy, was transformed with the seeds of hatred by the keepers of religion. Though a Hindu, Daddy lived with Amjad, his friend at Lahore. Amjads mother treated Daddy like her son and the family
94
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
had to send Daddy to Nanowal on the threatening call given by their mosque to throw the kafir out of their house. When he was living with Gajji his gym teacher, an untoward incident happens. Gajji comes home unexpectedly in the morning in his tonga with his decapitated body full of blood. Daddy takes out the ancestral sword of Gajji and goes to a busy market. With his hair hung loose, he starts chopping heads one after the other and runs to America. Simran mechanically is obsessed to remember her Daddy, his hair wild around his head, his eyes glazed, blood dripping from his sword, standing in a street hacking at people with his sword over and over again, slicing off heads and arms. This memory haunts her very much. When Simran narrates this to Sultana her jail mate, she too narrates her own story that she killed two Hindu men who burnt her house and destroyed her whole family. Both the narratives intertwine and become almost one. Simran learns that Sultanas family also like others is the victim of Partition communal riot. After three months when she is acquitted, immediately she goes to Iftekhar, the brother of Sultana. Entry to Karim Gali makes Simran realize the great ruin of Partition. Once upon a time, it was a Muslim occupied one and after all the Muslims ran to Pakistan, it was occupied by Hindus and others. She listens to the horrific stories of Khala, Ghulam Rasul, Iftekhar, Fatima and decides to help them to compensate her fathers guilt. She dares to stay on in India deceiving the police and disobeying the court order. She starts living in disguise. Police arrest is suspected and so Arun takes Simran to CCPH (Citizens for Communal Peace and Harmony), a peace organization at Jhakher. Kalida, the well-known peace activist takes good care of Simran. Simran voluntarily starts serving the organization by cooking, sweeping, printing to undo her fathers wrongs. But soon she realizes that Kalida is a fraud and has distributed seditious pamphlets in Sindh. Within few days of this act, a bomb blast takes place that kills many school children. Arun seems to glorify Kalidas naxalite and terrorist activities as inevitable actions for peace. She walks out of the organization and on the way had to witness a communal riot. The Hindus are bent to take the Shivratri procession in front of the mosque and Muslims against it. Soon Kalida tries to stop the mob, but the sadhus step on him and the mob destroys the mosque. Daddy, after
his wifes death became more introverts and always would lie on his couch and recall of his horrendous past. Till Simrans mother lived on, she ensured that Daddys past never troubled him. But after her death in a car accident on her way to pick Daddy from work, he became lonely and Simran understood his guilt and decides to undo it. But her noble gestures in India become meaningless in a land with contradictory laws. The second generation writers, like Anita Desai (1937), Bapsi Sidhwa (1938), Meena Arora Nayak, further removed in time from the events of Partition but clearly haunted by them, has had time to reflect on the meaning of events. Only The River Churning, Ice-Candy-Man and About Daddy become successful in articulating the sexual violence of Partition. Rest of the narratives just speak more of division and politics of Partition. The narrative is different from both plot and story. E M Forster had made a distinction between story and plot. The first merely narrated, the second established a causal connection. 32 Narrative, in a post structuralist world has acquired a new presence. Semioticians, linguists, philosophers, all have collectively helped transform the simple tale into a complex narrative allowing us to see the various levels of discourse present in it. The contemporary writer is part of this larger narrative both at conscious and unconscious levels. Elaborating upon the complexity of the narrative Paul Cobley points out .....as soon as we start to look more closely at this phenomenon, it is evident that the apparently natural impulse of storytelling or storylistening (or reading) is far from simple. ......even the most simple of stories is embedded in a network of relations that are sometimes astounding in their complexity. 33 Men and women have different kinds of experiences. The manner of contextualising, analysing and communicating is different. 34 It seems easier for the male writer to distance himself from the physical and the emotional trauma that the women go through, and this feeling reiterates itself as we read through Yashpal, Chaman Nahal and even Khushwant Singh (who belonged to the same generation). However, Jyotirmoyee Devi, Mumtaz Shah Nawaz, Attia Hosain, Ismat Chugtai, Bapsi Sidhwa and Amrita Pritam shy away from these
95
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
details of the atrocities that were done on women during these riots. In Chaman Nahals Azadi, Rahmatullah Khan abducts Sunanda from the refugee camp and rapes her in a lonely room. The entire scene is marked by a sensuous relish. Arun finds Sunanda: Then he heard Sunanda weeping. She was lying on the ground on an improvised bed of hay . and he saw her legs. Between her legs and top of her, was lying a man......The moonlight was coming through the window in the larger room and Arun could see clearly. She was still weeping. Get off me now, she said in a tired voice. The man did not move. Instead he started laughing.. smugly, a high pitched, shrill laughter. I knew Id have you one day, he said conceitedly. And he laughed again in triumph and satisfaction. Youre a beauty, he was saying. 35 This rape is built up in a leisurely manner. The cinematographic unfolding alleviates the sense of repulsion or shock that such a scene should create. The entire scene is suffused with an element of eroticism and the readers involvement tends to become voyeuristic. Women writers refrain from depicting graphic and unrestrained physicality because being women, there is a sense of identification with the victims. It is the violation of every womans dignity and so they make use of stories as when Ranna, in Ice-Candy-Man, listens to the stifled wails of women in the mosque in Pir Pindo: Stop whimpering, you bitch, or Ill bugger you again! a man said irritably.There was much movement. Stifled exclamations and moans. A woman screamed and swore in Punjabi. There was a loud cracking noise and rattle of breath from the lungs. Then a moment of horrible stillness. 36 Without vulgarity, the entire import of the scene is conveyed to the readers. Thus women writers do not present this gruesome aspect of Partition through titillating scenes which tend to impair the impact of the narrative. The scenes are well placed and are integral to the narrative. They are not superimposed. The scenes are presented realistically without diluting or sensationalizing the effect. The male writers mostly restrict themselves only to the depiction of rape, abduction and dishonour of women. They do not look into their psychological impact
or their long term ramifications on the victim. On the other hand, the women writers not only portray the victimization of women but also their mental trauma their pain, suffering, endurance and resilience. Writing by women provides a critical voice within the writing of the history of the nation and seeks to explore the meaning of alterity within the tradition of Partition fiction by women writers. As patriarchy confers alterity on the experience of women, female experience is homogenised, marginalised, and subjected to the norm of male experience. Literary texts, through their recounting of torture, suffering, and grief, rescript the essentialist narrative of a masculinist fundamentalism that casts women symbolically as the dependent, sexualised other in need of protection. They also subvert the dominant nationalist narrative or nation that regards them as the communal other. The tools used by the writers are that of interrogation, introspection, or even a faithful and clinical depiction of events of the past. Partition experiences buried in the memories are unleashed and treated aesthetically in art. The archives of memory collected in literature speak for the subaltern experience, which has been overshadowed by official history. The different versions of Partition question the engineered forgetting, the censoring as well as the denial of experience. Experiences of pain seldom enter historical records they exist in the realms of pain and silence, and are to be found in memory, in fiction, in memoirs. To recover these experiences, we shall have to turn to such unconventional sources. IV The documentary narratives present issues like the relationship between women communities and the state; between women and their families; and between women and their men. It explicates the gendering of citizenship, multiple patriarchies of community, family and state as experienced by women in their transition to freedom, and examines the deep complicities between them. It interrogates not only the history we know but also how we know it. The focus here is on the marginalised sections including women, children, dalits and minority groups. The authors of the documentary narratives make women not only visible, but also central by looking at the memories of loss and violence.
96
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
The documentary narratives supply oral narratives and oral history. Journals, diaries, memoirs and personal accounts by people who were involved at that time give an extended force. Accounts of Kamlaben Patel, Anis Kidwai, Damyanti Sahgal; tragic oral stories of Zainab and Buta Singh; Bir Bahadur Singhs oral recounting of the practice of assumed purity, untouchability, pollution in his village; interviews taken in a number of Sikh villages around Rawalpindi that reveals mass drowning incident of Thoa Khalsa as a revival of the Rajput tradition of self-immolation, fathers killing their daughters proudly with their kirpan as a sacramental act, women raped in the presence of husbands and young girls ravished in presence of parents and other incidents provide the most needed. The kinds of experiences people wrote about or described in their oral accounts, hardly ever figure in what we call traditional history. The argument is not of replacing or putting up against, conventional or factual histories of Partition. Rather these unconventional sources placed alongside such histories enrich and inform each other. It is also argued that the femalecentred texts challenge the silencing of women and counter the unabashedly masculinist narratives. Instead of subsuming such histories under the mantle of a supposedly gender-neutral discourse, feminist stories participate in the articulation of a diverse Indian female tradition both at the political and literary levels. Intensely realistic and personal, such narratives question the traditional patriarchal vision of nationhood and the circumscribed role of women in the economy of exchange in the modern nation. References: 1 Urvashi, Butalia. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. New Delhi: Viking, 1998. p 5. 2 Jill, Didur. At a Loss for Words: Reading the Silence in South Asian Womens Partition Narratives in Topia 4. P 53. 3 Mumtaz Shah Nawaz. The Heart Divided. 1957. New Delhi: Penguin, 2004. p vii. 4 See Authors Note in her novel The River Churning: A Partition Novel. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1995. P xxxiv. 5 Ravishankar, Rao. Crossing the Barrier: A Descriptive and Evaluative Study of Partition Fiction. Ph. D thesis. Mangalore University. 2003. P 21 - 22.
Jain, Jasbir. Beyond Post-Colonialism: Dreams and Realities of a Nation. Jaipur: Rawat, 2006. P 71. New Delhi: Prestige, 1999. P 105. 7 Biographical details are from the Authors Note and Introduction in Jyotirmoyee, Devi. The River Churning: a Partition Novel. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1995 and Debali Mookerjea-Leonard. Quarantined: Womenand the Partition. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/comparative_studies _of_south_asia_africa_and_the_middle_east/v02 4/24.1mookerjea-leonard.html. 8 Jyotirmoyee, Devi. The River Churning: a Partition Novel. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1995.p xxvii. 9 Stree Parva refers to a chapter of the Mahabharata 10 Jyotirmoyee Devi. The River Churning: A Partition Novel. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1995. p 13. New Delhi: Zubaan, 2004 rpt 2006. p 108. 11 Jill, p. 54. 12 Bhisham, Sahni. Tamas (Darkness) Trans. Jai Ratan. New Delhi: Penguin, 1974.. p 5. 13 Sukeshi, Kamra. Narratives of Pain: Fiction and Autobiography as Psychotestimonies to the Partition in Bearing Witness: Partition, Independence, End of the Raj. New Delhi: Lotus Roli, 2003. P 186. 14 Viney, Kirpal. Ed. The New Indian Novel in English: A Study of the 1980s. New Delhi: Allied, 1990. P xxi. 15 Meenakshi, Mukherjee. Preface. The Twice Born Fiction: Themes and Techniques of the Indian Novel in English. New Delhi: Pencraft, 1971 rpt 2001. p. 8. 16 See Bhisham Sahni. Tamas. P 6. Also see Smita Tewari Jassal and Eyal Ben-Ari. The Partition Motif: Concepts, Comparisons, Considerations in Jassal, Smita Tewari and Eyal Ben-Ari. Eds. The Partition Motif in Contemporary Conflicts. New Delhi: Sage, 2007. P 25. 12. Ritu, Menon. and Kamla Bhasin. Eds. Borders and Boundaries: Women in Indias Partition. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998. p, xi; 17 See Urvashi Butalia on the Official Silence in The Hindu. 21 September 1997. 18 Sanga C Jaina. Ed. South Asian Literature in English. London: Greenwood Press, 2004. p 51. 19 Anita, Desai. Clear Light of Day. New Delhi: Allied, 1980 rpt Vintage 2001. p 44.
97
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
Time For a New Messiah. Interview with Shirish Koyal. Times of India. 4 Oct 2001. Bangalore edn: 8. 21 Bapsi Sidhwa. Ice Candy Man. New Delhi: Penguin, 1988. The Water is filmed with the same title by Deepa Mehta recently. 22 Rada, Ivekovic and Julie Mostov. Eds. From Gender to Nation. New Delhi: Zubaan, 2004 rpt 2006. p 10. Jouvert: A Journal in Postcolonial Studies 1.2 (1997): 27 pp. l o j a n . 1998. P 9. 23 Ananya Jahanara Kabir. Gender,Memory, Trauma: Womens Novels on the Partition of India. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Duke University Press. Vol. 25, No. 1, 2005. P 177. 24 In Conversation with Bapsi Sidhwa in Partition Dialogues: Memories of a Lost Home. New Delhi: Oxford, 2006. P 225. <http://www.monsoonmag.Comlinterviews/i3int er_Sidhwa.html>. 25 Paul, Cobley. Narrative. London: Routledge, 2001. p 29. 26 Alok Bhalla. Ed. Partition Dialogues: Memories of a Lost Home. New Delhi: Oxford, 2006. p 237. 27 Ramachanda, Guha. India After Gandhi: The History of the Worlds Largest Democracy. London: Picador, 2007. P 94. 28 Kamran Rastegar. Trauma and Maturation in Womens War Narratives: The Eye of the Mirror and Cracking India. Journal of Middle East Womens Studies. Vol. 2, No. 3. Fall 2006. p. 22. http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/journal_ of_middle_east_womens_studies/v002/2.3rasteg ar.html 29 Ravishankar, 23. 30 Meena Arora Nayak. About Daddy. New Delhi: penguin, 2000. p 1. 31 Mushirul, Hasan and M Asaduddin. eds. Image and Representation: Stories of Muslim Lives in India. New Delhi: Oxford, 2000. P 110. 32 Forster E M. Aspects of the Novel. New Delhi: Atlantic, 1966. 1995. 33 Paul Cobley. P 2, 6. See Sudhir, Kakar. Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality. New Delhi: Penguin, 1990. P 1. 34 See Jasbir Jain. Gender and Narrative: An Introduction in Jasbir Jain and Supriya Agarwal. Eds. Gender and Narrative. Jaipur: Rawat, 2002. P ix xxiii. 35 Chaman Nahal. Azadi. New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1975. rpt 1988. p 307.
20
36
Bapsi, Sidhwa. IceCandyMan. New Delhi: Penguin, 1989. p 203.
98
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
A Note on Foucaults Notion of Discourse

Dr. R.T. Bedre Dept. of English SSJES ACS College, Gangakhed. Dist. Parbhani. (M.S.) Mr.K.U. Gangarde Researcher and Project Fellow Department of English at SSJES ACS College, Gangakhed. Dist. Parbhani. (M.S.)
Michel Foucault (1926 1984) was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas. He was a professor of History of Systems of Thought at the College de France, and lectured at the University at Buffalo and the University of California, Berkeley. Foucault is best known for his critical studies on social institutions, most notably psychiatry, medicine, the human sciences and the prison system, as well as for his work on the history of human sexuality. His writings on power, knowledge, and discourse have been widely influential in academic circles. He was listed as the most cited scholar in the humanities in 2007 by the ISI Web of Science (Wikipedia- Foucault). Power, knowledge, Archaeology, genealogy, episteme, dispositif, biopower, governmentality, disciplinary institution, and panopticism are his other notable ideas which earned him fame all over the world. His notable works are: Madness and Civilization (1961), The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1963), Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel (1963), Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966), The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977) and The History of Sexuality (1976). Foucault's works concentrate upon elucidating the particular power relations and discourses involved in different knowledge by way of an analysis of their respective histories. The present paper focuses on the Foucauldian notion of discourse. The notion of discourse plays important role in contemporary literary theory. It is central in all the books written by Foucault. Although it is originated in the disciplines of Linguistics and Semiotics, it has been extended up to many branches of human sciences. It has been used in the academic disciplines such as
literature, history, sociology, psychology, political science, culture, gender and postcolonial studies to define, explain and understand the problems in their respective fields of study. Discourse, according to Foucault, is related to power as it operates by rules of exclusion. Discourse therefore is controlled by objects, what can be spoken of; ritual, where and how one may speak; and the privileged, who may speak (Wikipedia-discourse). Discourse constitutes not only the world that we live in, but also all forms of knowledge and truth. Discourse generates truth or what some have called trutheffects. Certain discourses in certain contexts have the power to convince people to accept statements as true. Discourse thus is the means of power and it constitutes knowledge which is accepted in the society. Therefore, Foucault says in the first volume of his book History of Sexuality that it is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together. Discourse has become a central term for the poststructural critics who oppose the deconstructive method of analyzing the text. M. H. Abrams explains the concept of discourse as follows: In poststructural criticism, discourse supplementing (and in some cases displacing) text as the name of the verbal material which is primarily concern of literary criticism. In poststructural usage, however, the term is not confined to conversational passages but, like writing, designates all verbal constructions and implies the superficiality of the boundaries between literary and non literary modes of signification. Most conspicuously,
99
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
discourse has become the focal term among critics who oppose the deconstructive concept of the general text that functions independently of particular historical conditions. Instead they conceive of discourse as social parlance, or language-in-use, and consider it to be both the product and manifestation not of a timeless linguistic system, but of particular social conditions, class structures, and power relationships that alter in the course of history. (To) Michel Foucault, discourse-as-such is the central subject of analytic concern. Foucault conceives that discourse is to be analyzed as totally anonymous, in that is simply situated at the level of the it is said (on dit) (241). There are two strands of poststructuralist thought, first looks at text, textuality and discourse from the point of view of social control, power structure and subversive practices and second one is advocated by Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes whose stress vividly seem on language. Being a linguist, Roland Barthes echoes Derridas views. Lacan was psychologist. He opines that unconscious is structured like language. His approach is purely that of a linguist. Foucault differs from other post structuralists. Foucault criticizes Derridian deconstruction as mere rhetorical bag of tricks, a neat little pedagogy secure in its assumption that nothing exists outside the text (Krishnaswamy, 57). More over in his most influential book The Order Of Things: An Archeology Of Human Sciences Foucault says that man (or the subject of humanist discourse in general) as a figure is drawn in sand at the oceans edge, soon to be erased by the coming tide((Krishnaswamy, 58). It means discourse shapes everything in the world. Man is also a creation of discourse. He may disappear soon arrival of the new form of knowledge. Thus discourses constitute objects, concepts subjects and strategies. Further Abrams puts: Michel Foucaults view that the discourse of an era, instead of reflecting preexisting entities and
orders, brings into being into the concepts, oppositions and hierarchies of which it speaks; that these elements are both products and propagators of powers, and social forces; and that as a result, the particular discursive formations of an era determine what is at the time accounted knowledge and truth, as well as what is considered to be humanly normal as against what is to be criminal, or insane, or sexually deviant (Abrams, 183). What Foucault writes in his book History of Sexuality is worth quoting here: What is said about sex must not be analyzed simply as the surface projection of power mechanism. Indeed, it is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together. And for this very reason, we must conceive discourse as a series of discontinuous segments whose tactical function is neither uniform nor stable. To be more precise, we must not imagine a world of discourse divided between the accepted discourse and excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the dominated one; but as multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up against it, any more than silences are. We must make allowance for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it . (Foucault, 100-1) Thus the above discussion leads one to think that discourse is nothing but a way of seeing and thinking about the world. It refers to a particular mind-set bound by philosophical assumptions that influences a person to interpret the world in a particular fashion. It is also referred to analyze the systems of thoughts,
100
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
ideas, images, patterns of language, culture, network of social institutions and other symbolic practices. It produces concepts and truths. And it is to be understood as a part of social structure itself. Some questions that arise within this
framework, are: How some discourses maintain their authority? How some 'voices' get heard while others are silenced? Who benefits and how?
Works Cited: Abrahmas, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th Ed. Singapore: Thomson Heinle, 2004. Foucault, M. The Order of Things: An Archeology of Human Sciences. London: Tavistock, 1973. Howarth, D. Discourse. Delhi: Viva Books, 2002. Jadhav, Kamlakar. Speech Act Analysis of Political Discourse. Kanpur: Asha Prakashan, 2009 Krishnaswamy, N. John Varghese et al. Contemporary Literary Theory. New Delhi: Macmillan India Ltd., 2001. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Foucault
101
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
Harlands SuperstructuralismA Bridge between Structuralism and Post- structuralism

Chikte Ashok Bhimrao, Research scholar , Peoples College , Nanded. Contanct No. : 9921955734 Email-Id: chakrashok1@gmail.com
Man from the beginning of the civilization investigated the answers for the things which wondered him. So many philosophers, thinkers, polymaths and ideology-makers have tried their best to exhumate the essence of existence, being and truth. So many schools, beliefs, dogmas and isms tried to unearth the structure and core of the episteme of life. This structure of episteme and knowledge lured the men from his genesis and is still continued to the great exodus of mankind. There is a long chain of thinking menThales, Zeno, Epicurus, Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Locke, Hobbs, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Marx, Saussure, Foucault and Derrida. One new man has joined in the chain of thinkers and that is Richard Harland(Richard:p1) Richard Harland, a British philosopher, whose philosophical treatise on Superstructuralism and Post-structuralism have, literally shook the world of literary theory. Harland is also a popular novelist of steam-punk-type-fiction. His Vicar-series and Worldshakers made him famous among science-fiction readers. Harland reveals the colonial hegemony, alien-attacks and extra-territorial life. In 1987 he turned literary theory and philosophy(ibid:p3). Superstructuralism is not an alien theory in the world of literary criticism. So many philosophers tried to mingle structuralism and post-structuralism. Though Foucault called himself a hard-core post-structuralist, had a soft corner for the structuralist concepts like the power of centre and chronology of cultural evolution. Its true that post-structural key concepts like Derridean Deconstruction, Foucauldian historicity, Baudrillardian virtual-reality and Lyotardian conditionality of structuralism have formed the post-modern world, but these elements proved themselves unable rather impotent to discard structuralism as a theory, as a study and as an ideology.[3]
Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics.At a time when structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism appeared in academia in the second half of the 20th century and grew to become one of the most popular approaches in academic fields concerned with the analysis of language, culture, and society. The structuralist mode of reasoning has been applied in a diverse range of fields, including anthropology, sociology, psychology, literary criticism, and architecture. The most prominent thinkers associated with structuralism include the linguist Roman Jakobson, the anthropologist Claude Lvi-Strauss, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, and the literary critic Roland Barthes. As an intellectual movement, structuralism came to take existentialism's pedestal in 1960s France. Proponents of structuralism would argue that a specific domain of culture may be understood by means of a structuremodelled on languagethat is distinct both from the organizations
102
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
of reality and those of ideas or the imaginationthe "third order". In Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, for example, the structural order of "the Symbolic" is distinguished both from "the Real" and "the Imaginary"; similarly, in Althusser's Marxist theory, the structural order of the capitalist mode of production is distinct both from the actual, real agents involved in its relations and from the ideological forms in which those relations are understood. According to Alison Assiter, four ideas are common to the various forms of structuralism. First, that a structure determines the position of each element of a whole. Second, that every system has a structure. Third, structural laws deal with coexistence rather than change. Fourth, structures are the "real things" that lie beneath the surface or the appearance of meaning. In the 1970s, structuralism was criticized for its rigidity and ahistoricism. Despite this, many of structuralism's proponents, such as Jacques Lacan, continue to assert an influence on continental philosophy and many of the fundamental assumptions of some of structuralism's critics (who have been associated with "post-structuralism") are a continuation of structuralism. Post-structuralism is a label formulated by American academics to denote the heterogeneous works of a series of French intellectuals who came to international prominence in the 1960s and '70s. The label primarily encompasses the intellectual developments of prominent mid-20th-century French and continental philosophers and theorists. The post-structuralist movement is difficult to summarize, but may be broadly understood as a body of distinct responses to Structuralism. An intellectual movement developed in Europe from the early to mid-20th century, Structuralism argued that human culture may be understood by means of a structure-modeled on language (ie., structural linguistics)that is distinct both from the organizations of reality and the organization of ideas and imaginationa third order.(Richard:p8) The precise nature of the revision or critique of structuralism differs with each post-structuralist author, though common themes include the rejection of the selfsufficiency of the structures that structuralism posits and an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute those structures.Writers whose work is often characterised as post-structuralist include Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva. The movement is closely related to postmodernism. As with structuralism, antihumanism, as a rejection of the enlightenment subject, is often a central tenet. Existential phenomenology is a significant influence; one commentator has argued that post-structuralists might just as accurately be called "postphenomenologists." Some have argued that the term "post-structuralism" arose in AngloAmerican academia as a means of grouping together continental philosophers who rejected the methods and assumptions of analytical philosophy. Further controversy owes to the way in which looselyconnected thinkers tended to dispense with theories claiming to have discovered absolute truths about the world. Although such ideas generally relate only to the metaphysical (for instance, metanarratives of historical progress, such as those of dialectical materialism), many commentators have criticized the movement as relativist, nihilist, or simply indulgent to the extreme. Many so-called "post-structuralist" writers rejected the label and they dont have any manifesto. Its not hard to see that we are living in a time of rapid and radical social change. But it is quite hard to grasp the fact that such change will inevitably affect the nature of those disciplines that both reflect our society and help to shape it. Its also true that inherited from the past no longer seem to fit the reality experienced by a new generation. Therefore in various parts of the world, new methods of analysis have been developed whose conclusions reveal the limitations one of Eurocentric philosophy and thinking. New concepts of literary forms and modes have been proposed new notions of the natural perception. Superstructuralism is a fine example of this. Super structuralism tries to cope with structuralism and poststructuralism harmonious. According to Harland Superstructuralism is not a theory or an ideology, rather its a fragmental discourse of continues thinking. He asserts
103
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
Superstructuralism- I coin the term to cover the whole field of structuralists, Semioticians, Athusserian Marxists, Vulgar Marxists, Foucaultians, Derrideans, and Post-structuralists.Its in a sense, larger intellectual phenomenon over structuralism and beneath Post-structuralism. (Ibid:p13)
Harland clearly reject that the concept of superstructure in a mere copy of classical superstructure. Harland also confess that he is not aware of Hegelian concept of base-and superstructure .Harland also assets that his theory isnt a direct attack on Derridean active nihilism or Foucauldian passive territorialization. The structuralists are those who share a characteristic way of thinking about bare structure of any concept. Structural linguists like Saussure and structuralist-semiotician like Barthes also accept the fault of structuralism. But its true that there is also a chronological progression from the earlier structuralists, who tries its best within specific disciplines, to the latter semiotician, who unintentionally proclaims a single overarching study of culture as a whole. Thus structuralists only focus about surface level of human world.(Richard:p15) Thus, in this respect, Superstructuralism represents what Foucault would call an existence of underlying framework of approach and actual process. Hence one can say that Levi-Strauss or Baudrillard declares a war on Foucault. These hostilities are still conducted over a common ground; Harland hails post-structuralists as a small fish in big pond. This special way of thinking about superstructures in fundamentally is that it unites with the active and passive way of thinking. In fact, it is probably fair to assert that the influence of Superstructuralism upon the contemporary semiotics is mainly in the area of method and technique. Thus we can assert that Superstructuralism is not a counter human science. Thus the study of Superstructuralism will open a new horizon in the field of literary theory. References:1.Harland Richard, Superstructuralism, New Delhi, Routledge, 2010, 2. Ibid 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Harland 4. Harland Richard, Superstructuralism, New Delhi, Routledge, 2010, 5. Ibid 6.Ibid.
104
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
Structural and Post-Structural Theory: Literature as a Special Use of Language

Chincholkar B.B.
Head, Dept. of English, Rajarshi Shahu Mahavidyalaya, Parbhani. .
Kharabe R. P.
Ph.D. Research Scholar, J.J.T. University, Rajasthan.
Siraskar K. G.
Ph.D. Research Scholar, J.J.T. University, Rajasthan
Abstract:The paper has been attempted to explore language through structural and post-structural theory. The paper mainly focuses on the concepts of structural linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jakobson, structural anthropologist, Lavi-Strauss, structural semioticians such as Greimas and Barthes and the deconstructive philosopher, Jacus Derrda. Also further tries to present difference between the ordinary and literary language. To sum up, it is explained that the language of literature plays crucial role to demonstrate contextual meaning of selected text. Key words: Structural and Post-structural theory, Ordinary and Literary language.
Structuralism originates to the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussures idea of sign as a union of signifies and the signified in his Course in General Linguistics (1915). The term, structuralism refers to the works of structural linguists such as Saussure, Jakobson and structural anthropologist, Lavi-Strauss and structural semioticians such as Greimas and Barthes. Ferdinand de Saussure projects language as a sign system that communicates in relationships or inter-dependence. According to him, a sign consists of a signifier (sound image) and signified (concept) and the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. A sign also gives meaning only in relations to the totality of other signs. A structuralist critic views the work of literature as a kind of meeting place for different systems of meaning. In this regard Roland Barthes quotes; The text is not a line of words releasing a single theological meaning but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and class. 1 Thus, structuralism accepted that language does not directly latch on the
facts, but that all expressions in a given language acquire their meaning through contrast with the meaning of other expressions. As applied in literary studies, structuralist criticism conceives literature to be a second-order signifying system that uses the first-order structural system of language as its medium, and is itself to be analyzed primarily on the model of linguistic theory. In brief, structuralism offers a theory of literature and a mode of interpretation. Structural analysis does not move towards a meaning of a text. The work, as Barthes says, is like an onion: A construction of layers (or levels, or systems) whose body contains, finally no heart, no kernel, no secret, no irreducible principle, nothing except the infinity of its own envelopes- which envelop nothing other than the unity of its own surfaces ( Style and its Image, 10) Also, it is important to note that structuralists apply a variety of linguistic concepts to the analysis of a literary text, such as the distinction between phonemic and morphemic levels of organization, or between paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships; and some critics analyze the structure of a literary text on the model of the syntax in a well-formed sentence. However, the aim classic literary
105
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
structuralism is not to provide the interpretation of single texts, but to make explicit, in a quasi-scientific way, the tacit grammar (the system of rules and codes) that governs the forms and meaning of all literary productions. As Jonathan Culler put it in his lucid exposition, the aim of structuralist criticism is to construct a poetics which stands to literature as linguistics stands to language. (Structuralist Poetics, 1975, P.257) However, in the structuralist view, what had been called a literary work becomes a texi; that is, a mode of writing constituted by a play of internal elements according to specifically literary conventions and codes. These factors may generate an illusion of reality, but have no truth-value, nor even any reference to a reality existing outside the literary system itself. Post-structuralism is a continuation and simultaneous rejection of structuralismnot only literary structuralism but even more so the anthropological structuralism. Poststructuralism is generally some of the major claims of structuralism, and since it has its origins in the second half of the 1960s, when literary structuralism is still developing, it does indeed make sense to see them as two forks of one and the same broadly anti-humanist and linguistically oriented river. According to Derride, Saussures theory of sign consisting of signifier and signified is another version of the traditional concept of speech and writing. As Derrida states it:
logocentrism which is also phonocentrism: absolute proximity of voice and being, of voice and the meaning of being and the ideality of meaning. 2 In this way Derrida discards these three disciplines-metaphysics, linguistics and structuralism-as they have treated writing as secondary to speech. He calls this concept of writing as vulgar concept. Derridas intention is to liberate language and criticism from the totalizing and totalitarian influence of metaphysics. It is very noteworthy that Derridas new concept of writing is based on three complex words: difference, trace, and arche-writing. Difference means two actions: differing and deferring. Differing is the one not being another. It is spatial. Deferring is something being delayed or postponed. It is temporal. According to Derrida each sign performs double function differing and deferring. Hence, the structure of the sign is conditioned by differing and deferring and not by the signifier and the signified. This means that a sign is something that is unlike another sign and something that is not the sign. Each sign differs from another sign and it has its power of deferment, the capacity to postpone. Post-structuralism is unthinkable without structuralism. As I have already suggested, it continues structuralisms strongly anti-humanist perspective and it closely follows structuralism in its belief that language is the key to our understanding of ourselves and the world. Still, although it continues its antihumanism and its focus on language, poststructuralism simultaneously undermines structuralism by thoroughly questioningdeconstructing-some of its major assumptions and the methods that derive from those assumptions. Post-
The notion of the sign always implies within itself the distinction between signifier and signified, even if they are distinguished simply as the two faces of one and the same leaf. The notion remains therefore within the heritage of that
106
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
structuralism continues structuralisms preoccupation with language. But its view of language is wholly different from the structuralist view. In fact, language is at the heart of the differences between structuralism and post-structuralism. As we have discussed, structuralism applied originally linguistic insights to culture in general and literary structuralism applied them to literary texts. Language is culturally determined behavior. Language is a system of communication used by people living in society. In the beginning there were only visual signals but later on the use and the importance of the language was brought to notice. Language can be used on various ways. Ordinary language is used for everyday communication while literacy language activity to be studied as socially patterned behavior. Our daily life takes us through a series of activities involving the use of languages. In the literature, language is used in various ways to serve its aim. Language as a used in everyday gossip in scientific reports, in commercial or political persuasion and a number of other more or less every functions is the ordinary language. On the other hand, language as used in literature is literary language which is often not lucid and has multiple meanings. On comparative lines, ordinary language is informative and consists of original flow of thoughts while the literary language seems to be artificial and can be termed as aesthetic. Ordinary language is not deviant from the norm but literary language is creative and deviant from the norm. Literary language plays very vital role in the development of vocabulary and structure of language. Literature helps to internalize the grammar of language. Rizzo in his essay, The Teaching of English Literature in the Italian Educational System, comments;
Literature provides authentic examples of language in use so that students have an opportunity of internalizing the grammar and working out the meaning of words form the context. Thus, the language used in literature is very much deviant from the ordinary language. Literature helps to know and understand the various types of deviations such as phonological deviation, syntactic deviation, lexical deviation, semantic deviation and use of figure of speech. Literary language sometime is very difficult to understand because of its use in context and its deviations. For instance, in lexical deviation, it occurs due to deviation of words. Here poet or writer uses various words to express his feelings or thoughts. And poets words may not find in dictionary. Sometimes, poets create new words to their purpose and it occurs due to the deviation in the use of words. Hopkins creates new words in his poems; for instance, words, the unchilding, unfathering, window making sea. While studying this kind of deviation through structural and post-structural approach, it has many difficulties to understand the literary language. According to the structrualist, a sign consists of a signifier (sound image) and signified (concept) and the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. A sign also gives meaning only in relations to the totality of other signs. Such assumptions are not clearly able to expose the meaning of the lexical deviation in the literary language. In literary language, the semantic deviations are used to express the intentional meaning. Semantic deviation occurs in terms of meanings and meanings can be expressed in many ways. For examples, William Wordsworth in Prelude says, the child is the father of the
107
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
man. As concerned to this line, the poet compares the innocence of the child to a man and says that the child is more nearer to God. Also, another poem, Deffodils, Wordsworth says, Ten thousand saw I at a glance. In this regard, the structural and post-structural approach is unable to expose the meaning of the words and lines. To sum up, it is important to note that the language of literature plays crucial role to demonstrate contextual meaning therefore many deviations occurred in this language. In fact, language is at the heart of the differences between structuralism and post-structuralism. As we have discussed, structuralism applied originally linguistic insights to culture in general and literary structuralism applied them to literary texts. But it is difficult to understand in the context of literary language especially in the concerned with literary deviations. In short basically literature gives an exposure to the different cultures of the world. Reference 1 Barthes, The Death of the Author in Image-music-Text, 146. 2 B. K. Das, Twentieth Century Literary Criticism, New Delhi: Atlantic publishers, 2005. 3 M.Nagarajan, N. Krishnaswamy, S. Verma. Modern New Applied Delhi:
Linguistics,
Macmillan India Limited, 2002. 4 Johan Lyons, an Language and
Linguistics
Introduction,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
108
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
Literature and Literary Theory: An Introduction

Dr. Sanjay G. Kulkarni Asst. Prof. in English N.S.B. College, Nanded
There is lot of talk about Literature and literary theory in literary and cultural studies. The impossibility of maintaining a clear-cut distinction between ordinary, day-to-day communication/language and literary communication/language has been pointed out by many scholars but never come to the conclusion. Then one may have to know the definition of literature and Literary Theory to clear this distinction. According to N.KRISHNASWAMY, Literature is nothing but that transforms a verbal message into a work of art, a thing of beauty, a text with its own literary texture. To elaborate this J.L.Austin says the example of a man and wife when they marry in front of priest it assumes a religious value with no literariness. But in a play and film same statement has a literary and fictional value. We know that there is a connection between literariness and reality or between fiction and fact. As Ezra Pound says, Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. It is not for an age but for all time, not for any particular region or people. The purpose of great or timeless literature to humanize life, and the job of critics is to interpret and measure the worth of a text by testing it against the accepted great texts as the best evidence of taste; great literature needs to be interpreted because it reveals human values only suggestively. These notions about great literature and ideas about how to
appreciate, interpret it were very simple and straightforward. But the world as well as word keeps changing. The continuing change in the formation of social system, attitudes, values and ideas are explained in sociology in terms of what is called the wave theory; the same applies to literature and related notions. Basically, it is assumed that there are three waves. The First Wave was The Agrarian Revolution where was a time when life was more village centered, family centered and community centered. Imagination and perception was based on local experience with a desire for universalizing the local perceptions. Added to this the second wave was the Industrial Revolution which brought the resultant urbanization, Consumerism & Capitalism. Similar to this in third wave information technology has shifted repetitive tasks to machine like Robots, Computers etc. in the information revolution. Towards the end in our thinking every living thing changes the world, the word (i.e. the language), our perceptions, ideas & attitude; anything that does not change is dead. Notice that the word change is used both transitively & intransitively: we change the world and the world changes us; we change and world changes; similarly, we change the word and changes us; we change and the word changes. The world as well as the word is dynamic and not static; both are living organisms and the interactive process is highly dynamic. Literature being a reflection or imitation-the imaginative or intense expression and interpretation-of life (an escape from personality says Oscar Wilde), when our
109
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
notions about life change, our ideas about literature too are bound to change; and they have changed. Criticism has also changed in the course of time. This is revealed by literature in the way we use the word; for example, we talk not just about literature with a capital L but about Classical literature, Oral & Written literature, Religious literature, Adult literature, Children literature, Folk literature, Pop literature, Tribal literature, Tourist literature etc. This shows that imaginative literature is only one aspect of literature and it can not be equated with the whole says John Varghese in his book, Contemporary Literary Theory. In earlier part we pointed out the Introduction of literature but in present we will see the definition of literary theory. It is neither the theory of anything in particular, nor a comprehensive theory of things in general. Theory has radically changed the nature of literary studies and the systematic account of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing it. Theory is a bunch of names; it means Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Jacques Lacan, & Gayatri Spivak for instance. So what is theory? According to the Jonathan Culler in his book Literary Theory, it is the part of the problem lies in the term theory itself, which gestures in two directions. On the one hand, we speak of theory of relativity, for example, an established set of propositions. On the other hand, there is the most ordinary use of the word theory (i.e. theory signals speculation). A theory must be more than a hypothesis: it cant be obvious; it involves complex relations of a systematic kind among a number of factors; and it is not easily confirmed or disproved. If we bear
these factors in mind, it becomes easier to understand what goes by the name of theory. Theory is literary studies is not an account of the nature of literature or methods for it study it is a body of thinking and writing whose limits are exceedingly hard to define. The most convenient designation of this miscellaneous genre is simply the nick name theory, which has come to designate work that succeed in challenging and reorienting thinking in fields other that those to which they apparently belong. This is simplest explanation of what makes something count as theory. Works regarded as theory have effects beyond their original field. Theory in this sense is not a set of methods for literary study but an unbounded group of writings about every thing under the sun, from the most technical problems of academic philosophy to the changing way in which people have talk about and thought about the body. The genre of theory includes works of anthropology, art history, film studies, gender studies, linguistics studies, philosophy, political theory and sociology. The works in question are tried to arguments in this field, but they become theory because their visions have been suggestive or productive for people who are not studying those disciplines. Works that become theory offer accounts others can use about mining, nature and cultural. If theory is defined by its practical effects, as what changes people views, makes them think differently about their objects of study and their activities of studying them. The main effect of theory is the disputing of common sense; common sense views about meaning writing literature, experience. For example, theory questions the conception that the meaning of an utterance or text is what the speaker had in mind.
110
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
Thus, theory is an attempt to show that what we take for granted as common sense is in fact a historical construction, a particular theory that has come to seem so natural to us that we dont even see it as a theory. As a critique of common sense and exploration of alternative conceptions, theory involves a questioning of the most assumptions of literary study, the unsettling of anything that might have been taken for granted; what is meaning? What is an author? What is it to read? What is the subject who writes, reads, or acts? To see the example of some theory one may take two celebrated theories which involve critiques of commonsense ideas about sex, writing, and experience. There are several important things to note about this example of theory. For one thing, literature is about sex; literature is one of the places where this idea of sex is constructed, where we find promoted the idea that peoples deepest identities are tried to the kind of desire they feel for another human being. Foucault has been especially influential as the inventor of new historical objects: things such as sex, punishment and madness. His work treat such thing as historical construction and thus encourage us to look at how the discursive practices of a period, including literature may have shaped things we take for granted. For second example of theory, Foucault illustrates some differences within theory as we saw in the writings of Jacques Derrida. Rousseau also follows this tradition, which has passed into common sense, when he writes; languages are made to be spoken; writing serves only as a supplement to speech. Here, Derrida intervenes, asking what a supplement is. But Webster defines it as some thing that completes or makes an addition.
What we learn from these texts is that the idea of the original is created by the copies and that the original is always deferred never to be grasped. The conclusion is that our common sense notion of reality as some thing present, and of the original as something that was once present, proves untenable: experience is always mediated by signs and the original is produced as an effect of signs, of supplements. Foucault and Derrida are often grouped together as post-structuralists but these two examples of theory present striking differences. Derridas offers a reading or interpretation of texts, identifying logic at work in a text. Foucaults claim is not based on texts in fact he cites amazingly few actual documents or discourses but offers a general framework for thinking about texts and discourses in general. Derridsas interpretation shows the extent to which literary works themselves, such as Rousseaus Confessions, are theoretical; they offer explicit speculative arguments about writing, desire, and substitution or supplementation, and they guide thinking about these topics in ways that they leave implicit. Foucault, on the other hand, proposes to show us not how insightful or wise texts are but how far the discourses of doctors, scientists, novelists, and others create the things they claim only to analyze. Derrida shows how theoretical the literary works are, Foucault how creatively productive the discourses of knowledge are. There also seems to be a difference in what they are claiming and what questions arise. Derrida is claiming to tell us what Rousseaus texts say or show, so the question that arises is whether what Rousseaus texts say is true. Foucault claims to analyze a particular historical moment, so the question that arises is whether his large generalizations hold for other times and places. Raising
111
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
follow-up questions like these is, in turn, our way of stepping into theory and practicing it. So what is theory? Four main points have said by Jonathan Culler in his book, Literary Theory to study us such as 1) Theory is interdisciplinary 2) Theory is analytical and speculative 3) Theory is a critique of common sense 4) Theory is reflexive, thinking about thinking in literature. As a result, theory is intimidating. One of the most dismaying
features of theory today is that it is endless. Theory makes you desire mastery: you hope that theoretical reading will give you the concepts to organize and understand the phenomena that concern you. This very short introduction will not make you a master of theory, and not just because it is very short, but it outline significant line of thoughts and areas of debate, especially those pertaining to literature.
112
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
Novelness of Novel in the Essay: From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse by Mikhail Bakhtin --Mr. S.S. Duthade, Gram Vikas Sansthas, Arts College, Bamkheda T.T., Tal. Shahada, Dist. Nandurbar
Abstract:
The essay From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse (1940) is one of the noteworthy essays ever written by Mikhail Bakhtin. The essay talks about the genre Novel in general. The novel according to him is such a category which has distinguished features as well as vastly larger varieties and territories. For him novel is more a force than genre. He has expressed his view about novels Novelness in his present essay From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse. He reemphasize that the novelistic word arose and developed not as a result of narrow literary struggle among tendencies, style, abstract word- views-but rather in a complex centuries long struggle of cultures and languages. It is connected with major shift and crises in the fate of various European languages and the speech life of people and not mere literary style.
Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), one of the 20 century renowned philosophers and reputed theorists. He contributed in various branches of knowledge such as philosophy, linguistic, cultural studies and postmodern literary theories. It would be no exaggeration to call him distinguished thinker. As a thinker he has presented his own views on various aspects of studies. For instance, he maintained that the form and meaning of language are constantly shaped and guided by history and culture.From this he wanted to show that history and culture plays very crucial role in giving birth and shape to the language. Besides this he has also coined or invented certain terms or concepts such as heteroglossia meaning co-existence of different verities within a single code. Dialogism, meaning acting and reacting to a particular point in time and space. From all this it is clear that his contribution as theorist and thinker is noteworthy and remarkable.
th
In 19th century the form novel became increasingly popular, but unfortunately it has not been given importance as an area of study. Novel, according to him is the reduced size of history. It is a branch of philosophy which explores the philosophical problems surrounding the theory. Bakhtin shows that the novel is well suited to the postindustrial civilization in which we live, because it flourishes varieties. The essay is divided into three parts. In the first of the essay Bakhtin has given stress on saying that how the novel during 17th and 18th century could not recognized as an independent form. Poetic genre remained an unexplored. It concentrated on fine different stylistic approaches: 1) Use of direct words by author. 2) Neutral linguistic description. 3) Introduction of literary tendencies such as Romanticism, Naturalism, and Impressionism etc. 4) Authors personality to analyze the language. 5) The novel is viewed as rhetorical genre. He further compares the novel with all other genres. As in the novel poetic Imagining is used but rarely as compared to other genres. In the novel the author could express his ideas
Dialogic Imagination, a collection of four essays ever produced Bakhtin reveals his contribution. The essay From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse (1940) is one of the noteworthy essay the writer has written. The essay talks about the genre Novel in general. The novel according to him is such a category which has distinguished features as well as vastly larger varieties and territories. For him novel is more a force than genre. He has expressed his view about novels Novelness.
113
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
and observation only with the help of language.Conversation remained the fundamental constitutive element of all novelistic style as well as controlling image. Therefore, no unity in the language, the authors comment is found at any of the novels language level. It shows that literary language is not represented precisely but a mixture is found, as compared to that of other forms of literature. Therefore, authors language is used in the novel. During the initial part, only two factors of the novels are considered. They are laughter and Polyglossia. These two factors in the prehistory of the novelistic discourse are the subjects of the present essay. In the second part of the essay Bakhtin talks about how the various factors from ancient time paved the way for giving independent identity to the novel. Parody, according to him is one of the ancient direct word methods, which was used in poetry. A parody may represent ridicule these features of the sonnets. It is also used in periodic epic. He says that Homer in his War between the Nice and the Frogs has used parody. Therefore, periodic travestying, that is comic and serious treatment together in a text which was found in Roman Literature. The language broke through the grim atmosphere of seriousness of the middle ages to produce the work, as part of Renaissance in literature. For this reason Roman literature which is identified as low literature created immense number of periodic-travestying forms. The provided satires, epigrams, table talks, folk arts etc. It was, therefore, Rome that taught European culture, how to laugh and ridicule. Therefore it is a shift from parody to periodic-travestying played key role in giving shape to novel, rather it is skit from language to style, style to parody and parody to periodic-travestying. Therefore, language itself serves as a means of the direct expression. In this new context the Image of language or image becomes direct word. So, language, parody dialogic, scene from everyday life, humor etc. brought together in the novel, the Bakhtin calls it Heteroglossia to make the novel whole. One who creates a direct wordwhether epic; tragedy or lyric deals with the meaning and the object and themes are born and grow to maturity in the language. Therefore, the
power of a language dominated in literature says Bakhtin. It is not the one language but many languages come together and form a single language, Bakhtin calls it Polyglossia. For instance Roman Greek and Latin contribute a lot in the term Polyglossia such diversity or hybridization is influencing in the growth of novel. Even the Roman Literature at the outset was characterized by trilingulism. This Polyglossia is also called interlamination. The interlamination of major national languages like Latin and Greek can be seen. Therefore, the speech diversity within languages, thus, has primary importance for the novel. Its full creative consciousness only under conditioned of an active polyglossia. In the third and final part of the essay, Mikhail Bakhtin talks about stylistic problems during Hellenistic period. It was the problem of quotations. The quotations were varied sometime direct half hidden and some time directly hidden. The boundary lines between someone elses speech and ones own speech were flexible, ambiguous, often deliberately distorted and confused. On the other hand the role of parody in middle age was extremely important. But in modern time the function of parody are narrow and unproductive, parody has grown sickly. It pared the way for a new literary and linguistic consciousness as well as for the great Renaissance of the novel. Apart from this medieval scholar apparently tools this grammatical treatise completely, seriously and contemporary scholars are far from unanimous. The important genres such as sortie and Rabelais and Cervantes laid the foundation for the novelistic world. Conclusion: While concluding, the writer says that primarily the familiar strata of folk language that played such an enormous role in the formulation of novelistic discourse and composition of the novel as a genre. He reemphasize that the novelistic word arose and developed not as a result of narrow literary struggle among tendencies, style, abstract word- views-but rather in a complex centuries long struggle of cultures
114
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
and languages. It is connected with major shift and crises in the fate of various European languages and the speech life of people and not mere literary style. References: 1. Benita Parry, Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse in the Oxford Literary Review (1987) 2. Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle (1984) 3. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Poetics (1990)
4. David Lodge, After Baktin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (1990) 5. David Lodge, 20th Century Modern Criticism (1988) 6. Seturaman, Contemporary Criticism: An Anthology (MacMillian) (1989) 7. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction Oxford; Basi Blackwell (1983) 8. Wimsatt and Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History, NewDelhi, Oxford (1967) 9. Raman Selden: A Readers Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, Brighton, The Harvester Press (1985)
115
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
Phenomenological Criticism: A Study

--Pastapure. D.A. Vai. Dhunda Maharaj Deglurkar Collge Degloor Dist Nanded.
Phenomenological criticism was started by Germen thinker Edmund Husser (1859-1938). It is method of philosophical enquiry which lays stress on perceivers vital and central role determining meaning. It shows that the underlying nature of human consciousness and of phenomena (thing appearing). This critical approach involves and entry to an investigation of the underline nature and essence of a work of literature. Keywords : Phenomena, consciousness, intentional, perception, perceiver etc.
Phenomenology was established by the German thinker Edmund Husserl (18591938). The tern Phenomenology can be describe as Phenomena is greek word which means things appearing and logo is also a greek word the shows knowledge. So phenomenology means knowledge of things appearing. It is method of philosophical enquiry which lays stress of perceivers vital and central role determining meaning. Phenomenology claims to show us the underline nature of human consciousness and of phenomena. This was an attempt to revive the idea that the individual human mind is the centre and origin of all meaning. As for as literature and literary theory is concerned, The phenomologist critical approach involves and entry to an investigation of the underline nature and essence of a work of literature. Phenomenology has had widespread philosophical influences since it was put forward by Husserl in 1900 and later and has been diversely developed by Martin Heidegger in Germany and Maurice MerleauPonty in France. It has greatly influenced Huns-Georg Gadamer and other theorist concerned with analyzing the conscious activity of understanding language and has directly, affected the way in which may critic analyze the experience of literature. In 1930 the Polish theorist Roman Ingarden (1893-1970). Who wrote his both in polish and German adapted the phenomenological viewpoint and concept to a formulation of the way we understand are respond to a work of literature. In gardens analysis, a literary originate in the intentional act of consciousness of its author Intentional. In the phenomenological sense that the act are directed towards an object. These acts, as recorded in a text, make it possible for a
reader to re-experience the work in his or her own consciousness. Husserls conception of phenomenology has been criticized and developed not only by himself by his student Edith Stein and Martin Heidegger. According to Stephen hicks** write that to understand phenomenology one must indentify its root in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in his The Critics of Pure Reason Kant distinguish between phenomena (object as interpreted by human sensibility and understanding) and noumena (Object as thing in themselves) which human cannot directly experience. Husserl derived many important concepts central to phenomenology from the works and lectures of his teacher, the philosopher and psychologists Franz Brentano and Carl Stumf. An important element of phenomenology, that Husserl barrowed from Brentano is Intentionally (often describe as aboutness), the notion that consciousness is always consciousness of something the object of consciousness is called the intentional object, and this object is constituted for consciousness in many different ways. Through for instance, perception, memory, retention and pretention signification etc. throughout these different intentionalities, Though they have different structure and different ways of being about the object, an object is still constituted as the same identical object in direct perception as it is in the immediately following retention of this object and the eventual remembering of it. As George poulet says. When I read as I ought.. with the total commitment required of any reader, Then.
116
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
I am thinking the thoughts of another. But I think It is as my very own. My consciousness behave as though it were the consciousness of another2 George Poulet has also undertaken in a number of book to tell the story of the varying imaginative treatment of the topic of time throughout the course of western literature, regarding these treatments as correlative diverse modes of lived experience. In these histories Poulet sets out to identify for each epoch a consciousness common to all contemporary minds, he claims, however, that within this shared periodconsciousness. The consciousness of each author also manifests its uniqueness the influence of the criticism of consciousness reached its hight in 1950s and 1960s then gave way to explicitly opposed critical modes of structuralism and deconstruction. Many of its concept and procedures, how ever surrive in some forms of reader-response criticism and reception-aesthetic. Hans Robbert Jauss an important German exponent of reception theory. Jauss discuss the reader role from the philosophical Hermeneutics of HansGeorge Gadamer a follower of Heidgger Gadamer argues that all interpretation of past literature arise from a dialogue between past and present our attempt to understand a work will depend on questions which our own cultural environment allow us to raise. At the same time, we week to discover the questions which the work itself was trying to answer in its own dialogue with history. Thus phenomenology is a modern philosophical tendency that emphasizes the perceiver. Object can have meaning, Phenomenologists maintain, only an active consciousness (a perceiver) absorbs. In other words object exits if and only if we register them our consciousness. References:i. Abrams M.H. (2004), A Glossary of literary terms, seventh edition., prism book pvt. Ltd. ii. George Poulet, (1969). Phenomenology of reading. iii. Selden Raman, (1989) A readers guide to contemporary literary
iv.
theory, 2nd ed, university press of Kentucky. WWW.wikipedia.com
117
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
A Reading of John Miltons On His Blindness in the light of Deconstruction.

-- Phutke S.N P.A.Holkar College, Ranisawargaon.
Recently numbers of scholars have devoted themselves to the task of practicising literary theory in the classroom. This is becoming essential in demand with the contemporary trends in literary criticism. The present effort through the paper is to show how a familiar poem On His Blindness leads the reader to an indeterminate position in the light of Deconstruction. The pioneer of this theory was Jacques Derrida. He was a prominent French philosopher. He put forth his views in his three well known books entitled Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena. He is not the first person to use the term deconstruction, although it has become synonymous with him. The oxford English Dictionary (Vol 3,106) records that one McCarthy used this word in1882 in his Nineteenth Century: A reform the beginning of which must be a work deconstruction. It is derived from the French verb deconstuire means to undo the construction of, to take to pieces. Perhaps this sense of taking to pieces may have led the general perception of Derridas deconstruction with destruction alone. When we examined carefully the quotation from Oxford English Dictionary, it has become obvious that the work of deconstruction is not simply and solely for the sake of destruction. Whereas it is only a means to reform. Even though Derrida and his followers do not explicitly state such a reformation. It is implicit that they are aiming towards a radical change in our way of thinking.
the meaning of the term and show the relation between destruction and construction in deconstruction. The diagram shows that deconstruction comprises both destruction and construction, giving room for the explanation that there is no destruction without construction and vice-versa .This suggest the simultaneous co-existence. Also De- has three semantic functions i) relating, ii) reversing, and iii) intensifying. The relating de- refers to down, away, apart, aside, in such words as destruction, decrease etc. The reversing de- indicates a reversal of process as in demote, denationalize, denaturalize etc. and the intensifying de- adds emphasis to the root as in delimit, depict, deprave. All these three functions are involved in deconstruction. To limit the function of de- to one or the other would amount to going against the very spirit of free play that is main characteristic of deconstruction. It is supposed that deconstruction is very difficult to define, but it is not totally beyond the category of definition. Barbara Johnson have identified and discussed deconstructive reading strategies in a very simple manner in her essay Teaching Deconstructively (P.140-48). Her chief aim is to show how these strategies are useful in classroom situation to discuss on any work. She has given seven points, although these are not exhaustive in any way. These are ambiguous words, undecidable syntax, incompatibilities between what a text says and what it does, incompatibilities between the literal and the figurative, incompatibilities between explicitly fore grounded assertions and illustrative examples or less explicitly asserted supported supporting material, obscurity, and fictional selfinterpretations. For Miltons On His Blindness the first two strategies are employed. Firstly ambiguous words means multiplicity of meaning and secondly an undecidable syntax
De..con..struct.. ion
Diagram. The analysis of the word deconstruction may be useful here to clarify
118
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1
allows itself to be indeterminate. There are different opinion about the exact date of composition and the time when he becomes blind. As ordinary mortal human being he raises questions about Gods justice but as a pious puritan he accepts his lot. When we see this poem in the light of deconstruction reveals its undecidability. There are number of variations of this poem. For instance Davis and Davis, Hughes, Palgrave. These variations are not only concerned with the title On His Blindness by which it is popularly known, although not given by Milton himself, but also with punctuation, capitalization and spelling. Most of the edition like Palgrave has chosen to retain On His Blindness. Bernard and Elizabeth Davis have preferred to change the capital H to small h. Some of them have not given any title, but they identify the sonnet by the Roman numeral xix. All these changes in the title evoke the usually irrelevant question. Whose blindness is talked about in the poem? It may appear obvious that the poem is about Miltons blindness. However, the suspicion is strengthened by the capital H in His which conventionally refers to the God. It is important to note that both His and his are used in the poem frequently. Now it should be observed that editorial use of small h may be an attempt to fix the blindness once and for all with John Milton. The dubious nature of His or his, divine and human is further complicated by what Barbara Johnson calls the undecidable syntax. It is sentence structure that allows an ambiguity. The undecidable syntax in On His Blindness is the rhetorical question Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?(Ramachandran & Achar,48) Generally, it is supposed to contain a negative response and the patience also prevents the murmur by a reconciliatory tone which in any way is in opposition to Miltons sincere wish to serve his master. When we paid close attention to the use of adverb fondly the problem deepens. Usually fondly is substituted by foolishly and said that Milton shows his humility. To proceed from a deconstructive angle, the fool in foolishly is a
jester. The fool like the one in King Lear is a professional fool in the royal court who makes the mad king understand life by his intelligent and meaningful discourse. The foolish poet Milton, who asks an intelligent question about Gods justice, is in fact, throwing the questions of blindness to explosively ambiguous meanings, including the blindness of the poet, God, Justice, the world, the poem, the language, the reader and so on. The problem gains additional force through the very first line When I consider how my light is spent?( Ramachandran & Achar,48 ) Why Milton does used the active voice in the subordinate clause and passive voice in the object. Through how my light is spent? does he suggest that somebody else spent his light, that is eyesight? Could that somebody be God? If so, what kind of God is He/he? Perhaps the last question may lead the reader to correct notion of God that functions as an authoritative source of fixed meaning. In this way from above it is clear that the conflicting forces within text leads to indeterminate position. It is apt to conclude with Derridas opinion, language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique (Lodge & Wood,112)
Reference:
1) Palgrave, Francis. The Golden Treasury. Third ed., supplemented by Lawrence Bunyan. London:Macmillan, 1977. 2) Ramachandran, C.N. & Radha Achar,ed., Five Centuries of Poetry. Macmillan,1991. 3) Lodge, David & Nigel Wood, ed., Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. New Delhi:Pearson Education,2007. 4) Johnson, Barbara. Teaching Deconstructively, Atkins & Johnson,1985. 5) Davis, Bernard & Elizabeth Devis, ed., Poets of Early Seventeenth Century. London:Routledge & Kegan Paul,1967.
119
PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

2 Post Stucturelism

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Исходное описание:

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

2 Post Stucturelism

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Proceedings of National Seminar on Postmodern Literary Theory and Literature , Jan.

27-28, 2012, Nanded

Post-Structuralism: An Indian Preview

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

Re-Inventing the Metaphor: Women in the Narratives of Partition

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

Bapsi, Sidhwa. IceCandyMan. New Delhi: Penguin, 1989. p 203.

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

A Note on Foucaults Notion of Discourse

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

Harlands SuperstructuralismA Bridge between Structuralism and Post- structuralism

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

Structural and Post-Structural Theory: Literature as a Special Use of Language

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

Macmillan India Limited, 2002. 4 Johan Lyons, an Language and

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

Literature and Literary Theory: An Introduction

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

Phenomenological Criticism: A Study

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

theory, 2nd ed, university press of Kentucky. WWW.wikipedia.com

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

A Reading of John Miltons On His Blindness in the light of Deconstruction.

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

Вам также может понравиться