Post-Colonial Literature (E-C-305-C)

Name: kalani jalpa h.

Paper: Post-Colonial Literature (E-C-305-C)

Year: 2010-11

Semester: 3

Topic: Orientalism -By Edward Said

Orientalism- by Edward Said

ü  Orientalism is a book published in 1978 by Edward Said that has been highly influential and controversial in postcolonial studies and other fields. In the book, Said effectively redefined the term "Orientalism" to mean a constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the Middle East. This body of scholarship is marked by a "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture."^[1] He argued that a long tradition of romanticized images of Asia and the Middle East in Western culture had served as an implicit justification for European and the American colonial and imperial ambitions. Just as fiercely, he denounced the practice of Arab elites who internalized the US and British orientalists' ideas of Arabic culture.

ü  So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Muslims and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.

ü  Orientalism was written to show European American power over the orient and the mystification of “the other.” Argument put forth by said is contained in the analytical method he puts forth for the reader. Namely the classic bias oriental view is the result of an academic bias necessitated by western colonial and post-colonial politics. The oriental is portrayed as a static “other.” Creating a culture that is an object looking humanism. The western goal was to justify colonial politics, economics and hegemony over the centuries. Michel Foucault’s ideas- power of knowledge is important. British are able to rule acquire so much knowledge. Institutionalized study, Orientalism is common anthology and is also stereotype knowledge that is “true” is not political; rather it is based on one’s experience. Knowledge is something that must be gained. Said is a Palestinian Exile. Said writes a professor of English and comparative literature of Columbia University. He is a western oriental. His grasp of history is broad and impressive in its scope as it relates it his analysis. Orientalism is designed to challenge the bias imbedded in the western conscious. The orient was for centuries, based upon on intellectual construct that reinforced conditions of inequality. Said successfully argues the nature of cross cultural discourse needs to be reexamined. The orient that Said places in front of the reader is of “cultures, traditions, and societies” polarized by a western power agenda. Cultural growth is denied the orient with progress claimed and administrated by the Occident.

ü  Said summarized his work in these terms:

"My contention is that Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orient’s difference with its weakness. . . . As a cultural apparatus Orientalism is all aggression, activity, judgment, will-to-truth, and knowledge"

ü  Said also wrote:"My whole point about this system is not that it is a misrepresentation of some Oriental essence — in which I do not for a moment believe — but that it operates as representations usually do, for a purpose, according to a tendency, in a specific historical, intellectual, and even economic setting"

ü  Principally a study of 19th-century literary discourse and strongly influenced by the work of thinkers like Chomsky, Foucault and Gramsci, Said's work also engages contemporary realities and has clear political implications as well. Orientalism is often classed with postmodernist and post-colonial works that share various degrees of skepticism about representation itself.

ü  A central idea of Orientalism is that Western knowledge about the East is not generated from facts or reality, but from preconceived archetypes that envision all "Eastern" societies as fundamentally similar to one another, and fundamentally dissimilar to "Western" societies. This discourse establishes "the East" as antithetical to "the West". Such Eastern knowledge is constructed with literary texts and historical records that often are of limited understanding of the facts of life in the Middle East.

ü  Following the ideas of Michel Foucault, Said emphasized the relationship between power and knowledge in scholarly and popular thinking, in particular regarding European views of the Islamic Arab world. Said argued that Orient and Occident worked as oppositional terms, so that the "Orient" was constructed as a negative inversion of Western culture. The work of another thinker, Antonio Gramsci, was also important in shaping Edward Said's analysis in this area. In particular, Said can be seen to have been influenced by Gramsci's notion of hegemony in understanding the pervasiveness of Orientalist constructs and representations in Western scholarship and reporting, and their relation to the exercise of power over the "Orient.”

ü  Many scholars now use Said's work to attempt to overturn long-held, often taken-for-granted Western ideological biases regarding non-Westerners in scholarly thought. Some post-colonial scholars would even say that the West's idea of itself was constructed largely by saying what others were not. If "Europe" evolved out of "Christendom" as the "not-Byzantium," early modern Europe in the late 16th century (see Battle of Lepanto (1571)) defined itself as the "not-Turkey."

ü  Said puts forward several definitions of "Orientalism" in the introduction to Orientalism. Some of these have been more widely quoted and influential than others:

1)     "A way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European Western experience."

2)     "a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the Orient' and (most of the time) 'the Occident'."

3)     "A Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient."

4)     "...particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is as a verdict discourse about the Orient."

5)     "A distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts."

ü  In his Preface to the 2003 edition of Orientalism, Said also warned against the "falsely unifying rubrics that invent collective identities," citing such terms as "America," "The West," and "Islam," which were leading to what he felt was a manufactured "clash of civilizations."

ü  The orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences. Now it was disappearing; in a sense it had happened, its time was over. Perhaps it seemed irrelevant that Orientals themselves had something at stake in the process, that even in the time of Chateaubriand and Nerval Orientals had lived there, and that now it was they who were suffering; the main thing for the European visitor was a European representation of the orient and its contemporary fate, both of which had a privileged communal significance for the journalist and his French readers.

ü  The orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the orient- and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist- either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism. Compared with Oriental studies or area studies, it is true that the term Orientalism I less preferred by specialists today, both because it is too vague and general and because it connotes the high-handed executive attitude of nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century European colonialism. Nevertheless books are written and congresses held with “the Orient” as their main focus, with the Orientalist in his new or old guise as their main authority. Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the orient” and “the Occident.” I have found it useful here to employ Michel Foucault’s notion of a discourse, as described by him in The Archaeology of knowledge and in Discipline and punish, to identify Orientalism. From the beginning of the nineteenth century until the end of World War 2 France and Britain dominated the Orient and Orientalism; since World War 2 America has dominated the orient, and approaches it as France and Britain once enormously productive even if it always demonstrates the comparatively greater strength of the Occident, comes the large body of texts I call Orientalist. I have begun with the assumption that the orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there either.

ü  Having said that, one must go on to state a number of reasonable qualifications. In the first place, it would be wrong to conclude that the Orient was essentially an idea, or a creation with no corresponding reality. A second qualification is that ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied configurations of power, also being studied. To believe that the orient was created-or, as I call it, “Orientalized”- and to believe that such thing happen simply as a necessity of the imaginations, is to be disingenuous. The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of dominations, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony, and is quite accurately indicated in the title of K. M. Panikkar’s classic Asia and Western Dominance.” The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be “Oriental” in all those ways considered common west exercised power.

ü  This brings us to third qualification. One ought never to assume that the structure of Orientalism is nothing more than a structure of lies or of myths which, were the truth about them to be told would simply blow away. I myself believe that Orientalism is more particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the orient than it is as a verdic discourse about the Orient.   

English Language Teaching-1 (E-C-304)

Name: kalani jalpa h.

Paper: English Language Teaching-1 (E-C-304)

Year: 2010-11

Semester: 3

Topic: Teaching English as a Second Language in India: Focus on Objectives

Focus on Objectives

Ø  ABSTRACT:  After reading the whole essay, I find many points like, a variety of functions, multilingual setting form, a bidirectional, interactional process, is found in this learners to memorize paradigms and grammatical rules is also there , Dell Hymes theory of communication.

Ø  The Objectives of Language Teaching: These functions are two fundamental functions, helping children learn how to ask questions, the most development intellectual ability man has yet developed, and helping children use this language effectively in different social networks. Languages in a multilingual setting form a system network. Each language in this network has a function determined values of the other languages.

Ø  For example: We speak Gujarati but it differs from man to man.

Ø  We exposed some variety of language. Every language has variety even Sanskrit also even Hindi. For example: Ramayana is written in Awadhi because it is not known by Ravan, and it is the variety of Sanskrit. Expose to your learner with variety of language. They must keep the system. You don’t spit out some sentences, but you must use target language. While giving instructions they used after a week. Give instructions in English, so they practiced to listen and learn English words and sentences used by teacher. Every language has cultural specific.

Ø   The notion of “link language” or “lingua franca” has an important significance in a multilingual setting. It encourages wider mobility, national integration, and a sense of tolerance. Effective bilingualism or trilingualism or even multilingualism is a powerful way of enriching the linguistic repertoire of individuals. These used for rapid social and economic changes and modernization programmes. Teaching is not a unidirectional process of pumping bits and pieces of unrelated and undigested gobbets of knowledge into empty sacks. It is a bidirectional, interactional process. Learners are not just passive recipients of socially accepted language patterns. They play an active role in this teaching-learning process. They actively strain, filter and reorganize what they are exposed to. Their imitations are not photographic reproductions but artistic recreations. The learners are meaning-makers. The main objective at every level of teaching should be to help learners learn how to draw out their latent creativity.

Ø  Every learner is born with a built-in language learning mechanism. This mechanism gets activated when the learner’s is exposed to that language. Children learn the language they hear around them. Exposure to a rich variety of linguistic material is as important in first language acquisition as in second language learning. Learners should ideally be exposed to a variety of contextualized language materials. They must hear and see language in action. In that process the learners internalize not only the linguistic but also the sociolinguistic rules of the game, so that they capture the system which enables them to focus on “what to say when and how”. It should also enable them to organize words in sentences and sentences in texts effectively keeping in view “the topic of discourse”, “addresser-addressee relationship”, and “socio-cultural setting”.

Ø  Each of the four major skills: reading, writing, speaking and understanding, is composed of a hierarchy of subskills. The objective of teaching a language or languages is not simply to make the learner learn the major language skills but to enable the learners to play their communicative roles effectively and select languages according to the roles they are playing. “Every social person is a bundle of personae, a bundle of parts, and each part having its lines. If you do not know you lines, you are no use in the play.

Ø  A well-qualified, energetic and inventive teacher can be a “living” model, and act as the best audio-visual aid.

Ø  Functionally-determined sub-categories:

1)   First Language: First language is used for performing all the essential, personal functions. These are gradually expanded to all types, of interpersonal functions. “In order to live, the young human, has to be progressively incorporated into social organization, and the main conditions of that incorporation is sharing the local magic- that is the language”. First language is an indispensable instrument of national culture. It is the primary means for the transmission of culture from one generation to another”.

2)   Second language: Second language may be used as an auxiliary or associate language, as a slot-filler, performing those functions which are not normally performed by first language. For a vast majority of educated people living in towns and cities, English as a second language functions primarily as an interstate or international link language. Some of them also use it as an international language of knowledge trade and industry.

3)   Foreign Language: It is used by a select group of learners in a very restricted set of situations. The main objective of learning a foreign language is to have direct access to the speakers of these language and their cultures. It enables the learners to participate in a foreign society in certain roles and certain situations. A foreign language like Russian is used in India for absorbing the cultural patterns of the USSR; English as a second language is used in India as an alternative way of expressing Indian patterns of life.

4)   Classical Language: A classical language like Sanskrit provides access to ancient culture, learning and philosophy of life and is assumed to contribute to the intellectual enrichment of its learners. Its real value cannot be measured in terms of refining your sensibility, and sharpening your tools of analysis, enriching into a variety of linguistic problems.

Ø  Objectives of teaching English as a second language in India: The objectives have to be formulated in the light of what we perceive our needs for English to be in a multilingual setting, at both the national and individual levels. At the national English must serve as our “window on the world”, as the language in which nearly all contemporary knowledge is accessible. As the language of science and technology, trade and commerce, political science, economics and international relations, English will be important for industrial and economic development. It will function as the “language of development”. Our scientists, technologists, engineers, doctors and economists must be able not only to have access to professional literature in English but also to contribute to it, and to communicate with their counterparts in other countries. The continuation of English seems important if our science and technology, trade and commerce, are to be truly international.

Ø  System is well planed structure. System has its executes it refers performer. Competent is about knowledge in language. Make ability to use your knowledge is performance. Learning language is not about learned English. English learned by not only language but in action.

Ø  For example: kaushal like his watch. So is connected with kaushal and we are talking about his watch.

Ø  So this is coherence. Logical idea behind that is cohesion. For example: a thin boy punched a fat boy but logically it’s true that he punched a fat boy so it is cohesion. Many times we don’t use an, means, but they understand so that is called discourse. And also analysis course in context is the discourse place gives the meanings and depends on the tone. You should teach conversations are different. Ask your student to learn how language of the way of functioning not only accuracy but also appropriacy is important. Language of rules changed by age by age.

Ø  For example: At that time ‘sir’ is not used for ordinary persons. And now we used ‘sir’ for the every person. ‘Sir’ is like an award at that time.

Ø  As the associate official language, an international “link language”, the language  favored by all-Indian institutions, the legal and banking systems, trade and commerce and defense. English has important functions to serve internally in addition to its role as our “window on the world”. English may continue to be the medium of instruction in several faculties at the college level. These students will need a greater proficiency in the skills of listening, writing and speaking than students being taught through other languages.

American Literature (E-C-303)

Name: kalani jalpa h.

Paper: American literature (E-C-303)

Year: 2010-11

Semester: 3

Topic: Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

Road Not Taken

Ø  Robert Lee Frost was born in March 26, 1874 in San Francisco, California, United States. Ha was died in January 29, 1963 (aged 88) in Boston, Massachusetts, United States.

Ø  He was an American Poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes. A popular and often-quoted poet. Frost was honored frequented by during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer prizes for poetry.

Ø  His personal life was played with grief and loss. In 1885 when frost was 11, his father died of cancer in 1900. In 1920, Frost had t commit his younger sister Jeanie to a Mental hospital, where she died nine years later. Mental illness Opportunity ran in Frost’s family, as both he and his mother suffered from depression, and his daughter Irma was committed to a mental hospital in 1947. Frost’s wife, Elinor, also experienced bouts of depression.

Ø  Elinor and Robert Frost had six children: son (1896-1904, died of cholera); daughter Lesley Frost Ballantine (1899-1983); son Carol (1902-1940 committed suicide); daughter Irma (1903-1967) daughter Marjorie (1905-1934, died as a result of puerperal fever often childbirth) and daughter Elinor Bettina (died just three days after her birth in 1907). Only Lesley and Irma outlived their father. Frost’s wife, who had heart problem throughout her life, developed breast cancer in 1937 and died of heart failure in 1938.

Ø  A selected bibliography:

A Boy’s Will (1916), North of Boston (1914), Mountain Interval (1916), New Hampshire (1923), West-Running Brook (1928), The Lovely Shall be choosers (1929), The Lone Striker (1933), From snow to snow (1936), A Further Range (1936), A Witness Tree (1942), Come In, and other poem (1943), Masque of Reason (1945), Steeple Bush (1947), hard not to be king(1951).   

Ø  The Road Not Taken is one of the finest and the most popular of the lyrics, published in 1916 in the volume of poems entitled Mountain Interval. It is one of those lyrics which combine “inner lyric vision and the outer contemplative narration.” The poet’s imagination is set at work by the difficulty of choosing one of the two roads. Which diverge of a particular point, and he comments on the difficulty and significance of making a choice is a very significant theme in Frost’s poetry, and it is also the theme of the present poem.

Ø  The Road Not Taken is a poem which has been much admired and much- quoted, as well as much misunderstood and criticized. It is a great lyric which records a personal experience of the poet but from the personal and individual, the poet soon rises to the universal and the general. The poet’s experience becomes symbolic of human experience in all ages and countries. The difficulty of making a choice is a universal one, and in this way the lyric is true to universal of the lyric. “He regards it as the work of a spiritual drifter one who fails to make a definite choice. He writes, The Road Not Taken, for example, is the poem of a man whom one might fairly call a spiritual drifter; and a spiritual drifter unlikely to have either the intelligence or the energy to become a major poet. Yet the poem has definite virtues, and these should not be over looked. In the first place, spiritual drifter exist, they are real; and although their decisions may not be comprehensible. The poem renders the experience of such a person, and renders the uncertain melancholy of his plight. Had Frost been a more intelligent man, he might have seen that the plight of the spiritual drifter was not inevitable; he might have written a greater poem. But his poem is good as far as it goes; the trouble is that it does not go far enough it is incomplete, and it puts on the reader the burden of critical intelligence which ought to be borne by the poet.”

      The language of the lyric is characterized by simplicity, clarity, and epigrammatic force and terseness. There are four stanzas each of five lines. Each line consists of eight syllables, through variations have been skillfully introduced to impart the informality and casualness of the spoken tongue. It is a personal lyric and as such it does not have the parenthesis the dashes, the pauses and ejaculations which characterize the dramatic lyrics.

Conclusion: It was grassy and wanted wear grass on it had worn out by human feet. This showed that it was less frequented than the other one.

The passing there- the people travelling that way.

Somewhere ages and ages hence- in times to come; in the distant future.

 

Research Methodology (E-C-302)

Name: kalani jalpa h.

Paper: Research Methodology (E-C-302)

Year: 2010-11

Semester: 3

Topic: Scholar’s Life

The Scholar’s Life

v Literary Scholar never ceases being scholars. Today the great majority of them earn their living as members of teaching faculties in colleges and universities throughout the world. As such, they have responsibilities quite remote from the pursuit of knowledge. But in the midst of alien affairs that necessarily command their talents and energies as teachers, administrators, and academic committee members, and in their private roles spouses, parents, and participants in community activities and other good works, scholars cannot suppress, even if they wished to do so, that portion of their consciousness that insists on asking questions about literary matters and seeking answers. Their literary awareness keeps twenty-four-hour days: the bookish excitement that has attracted them to the profession in the first place permeates their lives.

v For example: As a student in school or college he was very poor, dull but as a teacher he was very good teacher.

v It is now almost a century since literary studies began from to be professionalized- that is, transformed from an avocation pursued by persons who made their living as cultural journalists, British civil servants, or in other occupations, into what has become a highly organized and sophisticated intellectual discipline centering in the academy professionalized literary scholarship is now old enough to possess its own teachers in American institutions of higher learning or were their counterparts in British universities: Douglas Bush, E. K. Chambers, R. W. Chapman, Helen Gardner, W. W. Greg, Howard Mumford Jones, George Lyman Kittredge, Roger Sherman Loomis, A.O. Lovejoy, John Livingston Lowes, Kemp Malone, F. O. Matthiessen, Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Perry Miller, Frederick Pottle, F. N. Robinson, Hyder Rollins, Robert  K. Root, George Sherburn, Henry Nash Smith, Rosamond Tuve, Helen White, Karl Young. Those groundbreakers in the profession, the commanding figures during the “golden age” when research dominated English studies from the 1920s through the 1960s. Some historians and critics of our profession claim for the early formative decades a now lost breadth of learning and intellectual rigor. The scope of English studies now also includes writing theory and pedagogy. At the same time, the meanings of that eternally slippery word “meaning” have been drastically redefined. It is quite likely that some of the “immortals” mentioned above would today scarcely recognize the profession of English studies they helped found and develop. These figures, impressive in themselves, do not reflect another form of communal scholarly activity, the scores of conferences of special-interest groups that are held each year, with their own array of prepared papers and discussions.

v Yet, despite all this elaborate programming and, in the case of the MLA, bureaucratic infrastructure, the study of literature remains at base an intensely private pursuit. They may not earn as much or enjoy as much social status as do their contemporaries in other lines of work, but they have the sharper satisfaction of having a vocation that enables them to do what they most want to do in life. Love of books and a consuming interest in the intellectual and esthetic questions they pose unite persons with amazingly different backgrounds and tastes.

v In research, then there are numerous perquisites: the constant company of books, the pleasures of travel, the unlooked-for adventure, the frequent encounter with delightful and helpful people. Although no professional statute governs the matter, it is generally agreed that the possessors are entitled to exclusive rights to the use of their material only so long as they are actively working toward publication. But if they simply sit on their claim indefinitely, meanwhile refusing to let any other, more energetic, scholar mine it, such action contravenes the very spirit of scholarship. This plea is not as altruistic as it might seem. Thus two principles emerge. First, let others know what you are working on. Second, corollary to the first: keep up with what other people are doing, not only in your own field but in others as well. Maintain the same interest in their research that you hope they have in yours. Our profession has no room for intemperate criticism of any kind, least of all in print. Differences, lapses of judgment and tribute equally among all practitioners, lapses of judgment and imperfections of knowledge will sometimes call for comment. But the necessary process of debate and correction can, and should, be conducted with dignity and courtesy.

v Thus our profession has ethical standards that, white unwritten, are as binding as the Hippocratic Oath and the Bar Association’s canons. They are sustained by the desirability of fair play, self-respect, and professional morale. We sometimes are discouraged and may share the belief, so prevalent in the world outside, that our achievements have an unreal quality, or, if they are real, at least they are futile: that they add nothing to the sum of human wisdom or happiness. We gladly learn, but outside the classroom many of us are curiously uninterested in teaching. They are physically here but mentally they are not in the classroom and in teaching. If the humanities, including the study of literature, are in perennial crisis- more so at the present moment, perhaps, than ever before- and the outlook for their survival grim, blame must lie as heavily on us, their appointed agents, for our lack of enterprise, as on the supposed un receptiveness of the prospective consumers.

v Our contribution as scholars in this regard is only a slight modification of our essentially two-fold task in the classroom: to educate students at all levels to read, write, and think, developing in them the intellectually curious habit of mind that casts a disinterested eye over all important issues, appreciating their complexities: and to lead students by extensive reading and critical analysis of recognized writers and thinkers, ancient and contemporary, inside and outside the mainstream, to seek, in Mathew Arnold’s words, “the best that is known and thought in the world” for the purpose of creating in their own lives a ”Current of new and fresh ideas” appropriate in this, our time.

Modernist Literature (E-C-301)

Name: kalani jalpa h.

Paper: Modernist Literature (E-C-301)

Year: 2010-11

Semester: 3

Topic: “what the Thunder Said” by T. S. Eliot

“What the Thunder Said”

Ø Thomas Stearns Eliot, or T.S. Eliot as he is better known, was born in 1888 in St. Louis. He was the son of a prominent industrialist who came from a well- connected Boston family. Eliot always felt the loss of his family’s New England roots and seemed to be somewhat ashamed of his father’s business success; throughout his life he continually sought to return to the epicenter of Anglo- Saxon culture, first by attending Harvard and then by emigrating to England, where he lived from 1914 until his death. Eliot began graduate study in philosophy at Harvard and completed his dissertation, although the outbreak of World War I prevented him from taking his examinations and receiving the degree. By that time, though, Eliot had already written “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and the War, which kept him in England, led him to decide to pursue poetry full-time.

Ø Eliot met Ezra Pound in 1914, as well, and it was Pound who was his main mentor and editor and who got his poems published and noticed. During a 1921 break from his job as a bank clerk (to recover from a mental breakdown), Eliot finished the work that was to secure him fame, The Waste Land. This poem heavily edited by Pound and perhaps also by Eliot’s wife, Vivien, addressed the fragmentation and alienation characteristic of modern culture, making use of these fragments to create a new kind of poetry. It was also around this time that Eliot began to write criticism, partly in an effort to explain his own methods. In 1925, he went to work for the publishing house Faber & Faber. Despite the distraction of his wife’s increasingly serious bouts of mental illness, Eliot was from this time until his death the preeminent literary figure in the English-speaking world; indeed, he was so monumental that younger poets often went out of their way to avoid his looming shadow, painstakingly avoiding all similarities of style.

Ø Eliot became interested in religion in the later 1920s and eventually converted to Anglicanism. His poetry from this point onward shows a greater religious bent, although it never becomes dogmatic the way his sometimes controversial cultural criticism does. Four Quartets, his last major poetic work, combines a Christian sensibility with a profound uncertainty resulting from the war’s devastation of Europe. Eliot died in 1965 in London.

Ø In October 1922 Eliot published The Wasteland in the Criterion. Eliot’s dedication to it might be fabbro (“the better Craftsman”) refers to Ezra Pound’s significant hand in editing reshaping the poem from a longer Eliot manuscript to the shortened version that appears in publication. It was composed during a period of personal difficulty for Eliot – his marriage was failing, and both he and Vivienne were suffering from nervous disorders. The poem is often read as a representation of the disillusionment of the post-war generation. Before the poem’s publication as a book in December 1922, Eliot distanced himself from its vision of despair. On November 15, 1922, he wrote to Richard Aldington, saying, “As for the Waste Land, that is a thing of the past so far as I am concerned and I am now feeling towards a new form and style.” The poem is known for its obscure nature- its slippage between satire and prophecy; its abrupt changes of Speaker, location, and time. Despite this, it has become a touchstone of Modern Literature, a poetic counterpart to a novel published in the same year, James Joyce’s Ulysses. Among its best-known phrases are “April is the cruelest month”, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust”; and “Shantih shantih shantih”, the Sanskrit mantra that ends the poem.

Ø The end of The Waste Land is dramatic in both its imagery and its events. The first half of the section builds to an apocalyptic climax, as suffering people become “hooded hordes swarming” and the “unreal” cities of Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, and London are destroyed, rebuilt, and destroyed again. A decaying chapel is described, which suggests the chapel in the legend of the Holy Grail. Atop the chapel, a cock crows, and the rains come, relieving the drought and bringing life back to the land. Curiously, no heroic figure has appeared to claim the Grail; the renewal has come seemingly at random, gratuitously.

Ø The scene then shifts to the Ganges, half a world away from Europe, where thunder rumbles. Eliot draws on the traditional interpretation of “what the thunder says,” as taken from the Upanishads (Hindu fables). According to these fables, the thunder “gives,” “sympathizes,” and “controls” through its “speech”; Eliot launches into a meditation on each of these aspects of the thunder’s power. The meditations seem to bring about some sort of reconciliation, as a Fisher King-type figure is shown sitting on the shore preparing to put his lands in order, a sign of his imminent death or at least abdication. The poem ends with a series of disparate fragments from a children’s song, from Dante, and from Elizabethan drama, leading up to a final chant of “Shantih shantih shantih”—the traditional ending to an Upanishad. Eliot, in his notes to the poem, translates this chant as “the peace which passeth understanding,” the expression of ultimate resignation.

Ø Just as the third section of the poem explores popular forms, such as music, the final section of The Waste Land moves away from more typical poetic forms to experiment with structures normally associated with religion and philosophy. The proposition and meditation structure of the last part of this section looks forward to the more philosophically oriented Four Quartets, Eliot’s last major work. The reasoned, structured nature of the final stanzas comes as a relief after the obsessively repetitive language and alliteration (“If there were water / and no rock / If there were rock / and also water...”) of the apocalyptic opening. The reader’s relief at the shift in style mirrors the physical relief brought by the rain midway through the section. Both formally and thematically, then, this final chapter follows a pattern of obsession and resignation. Its patterning reflects the speaker’s offer at the end to “fit you,” to transform experience into poetry.

Ø The initial imagery associated with the apocalypse at this section’s opening is taken from the crucifixion of Christ. Significantly, though, Christ is not resurrected here: we are told, “He who was living is now dead.” The rest of the first part, while making reference to contemporary events in Eastern Europe and other more traditional apocalypse narratives, continues to draw on Biblical imagery and symbolism associated with the quest for the Holy Grail. The repetitive language and harsh imagery of this section suggest that the end is perhaps near, that not only will there be no renewal but that there will be no survival either. Cities are destroyed, rebuilt, and destroyed, mirroring the cyclical downfall of cultures: Jerusalem, Greece, Egypt, and Austria—among the major empires of the past two millennia—all see their capitals fall. There is something nevertheless insubstantial about this looming disaster: it seems “unreal,” as the ghost-filled London did earlier in the poem. It is as if such a profound end would be inappropriate for such a pathetic civilization. Rather, we expect the end to be accompanied by a sense of boredom and surrender.

Ø Release comes not from any heroic act but from the random call of a farmyard bird. The symbolism surrounding the Grail myth is still extant but it is empty, devoid of people. No one comes to the ruined chapel, yet it exists regardless of who visits it. This is a horribly sad situation: The symbols that have previously held profound meaning still exist, yet they are unused and unusable. A flash of light—a quick glimpse of truth and vitality, perhaps—releases the rain and lets the poem end.

Ø The meditations upon the Upanishads give Eliot a chance to test the potential of the modern world. Asking, “What have we given?” he finds that the only time people give is in the sexual act and that this gift is ultimately evanescent and destructive: He associates it with spider webs and solicitors reading wills. Just as the poem’s speaker fails to find signs of giving, so too does he search in vain for acts of sympathy—the second characteristic of “what the thunder says”: He recalls individuals so caught up in his or her own fate—each thinking only of the key to his or her own prison—as to be oblivious to anything but “ethereal rumors” of others. The third idea expressed in the thunder’s speech—that of control—holds the most potential, although it implies a series of domineering relationships and surrenders of the self that, ultimately, are never realized.

Ø Finally Eliot turns to the Fisher King himself, still on the shore fishing. The possibility of regeneration for the “arid plain” of society has been long ago discarded. Instead, the king will do his best to put in order what remains of his kingdom, and he will then surrender, although he still fails to understand the true significance of the coming void (as implied by the phrase “peace which passeth understanding”). The burst of allusions at the end can be read as either a final attempt at coherence or as a final dissolution into a world of fragments and rubbish. The king offers some consolation: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” he says, suggesting that it will be possible to continue on despite the failed redemption. It will still be possible for him, and for Eliot, to “fit you,” to create art in the face of madness. It is important that the last words of the poem are in a non-Western language: Although the meaning of the words themselves communicates resignation (“peace which passeth understanding”), they invoke an alternative set of paradigms to those of the Western world; they offer a glimpse into a culture and a value system new to us—and, thus, offer some hope for an alternative to our own dead world.