Friday, 5 April 2019
Postmodernism and Popular Culture
Assignment :- 8 Postmodernism and Popular Culture
Name :- Rathod Nikita P.
Roll no :- 23
Enrolment no :- 2069108420190038
Semester :- M. A. Semester - 2
Year :- 2018-2020
Paper no :- 8 (Cultural Studies)
Assignment topic :- Postmodernism and Popular Culture
Email - id :- nikitarathod0101@gmail.com
Submitted to :- S. B. Gardi Department of English, Maharaja Krishankumarshinji Bhavanagar University.
(1) Postmodernism and Popular Culture.
=> postmodernism and Popular culture are the types of cultural studies.
1. Postmodernism :-
Postmodernism is a broad movement that developed in the mid- to late 20th century across philosophy, the arts, architecture, and criticism and that marked a departure from Modernism. The term has also more generally been applied to the historical era following modernity and the tendencies of this era.
While encompassing a wide variety of approaches, postmodernism is generally defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony, or rejection toward the meta-narratives and ideologies of modernism, often calling into question various assumptions of Enlightenment rationality.Consequently, common targets of postmodern critique include universalist notions of objective reality, morality, truth, human nature, reason, language, and social progress.Postmodern thinkers frequently call attention to the contingent or socially-conditioned nature of knowledge claims and value systems, situating them as products of particular political, historical, or cultural discourses and hierarchies. Accordingly, postmodern thought is broadly characterized by tendencies to self-referentiality, epistemological and moral relativism, pluralism, and irreverence.
Postmodern critical approaches gained purchase in the 1980s and 1990s, and have been adopted in a variety of academic and theoretical disciplines, including cultural studies, philosophy of science, economics, linguistics, architecture, feminist theory, and literary criticism, as well as art movements in fields such as literature and music. Postmodernism is often associated with schools of thought such as deconstruction and post-structuralism, as well as philosophers such as Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Fredric Jameson.
Postmodernism arose after World War II as a reaction to the perceived failings of modernism, whose radical artistic projects had come to be associated with totalitarianism or had been assimilated into mainstream culture. The basic features of what is now called postmodernism can be found as early as the 1940s, most notably in the work of artists such as Jorge Luis Borges. However, most scholars today would agree that postmodernism began to compete with modernism in the late 1950s and gained ascendancy over it in the 1960s. Since then, postmodernism has been a dominant, though not undisputed, force in art, literature, film, music, drama, architecture, history, and continental philosophy.
Salient features of postmodernism are normally thought to include the ironic play with styles, citations and narrative levels, a metaphysical skepticism or nihilism towards a "grand narrative" of Western culture, a preference for the virtual at the expense of the Real (or more accurately, a fundamental questioning of what 'the real' constitutes) and a "waning of affect" on the part of the subject, who is caught up in the free interplay of virtual, endlessly reproducible signs inducing a state of consciousness similar to schizophrenia.
Since the late 1990s there has been a small but growing feeling both in popular culture and in academia that postmodernism "has gone out of fashion".
Postmodernism, like post-structuralism and deconstruction, is a critique of the aesthetics of the preceding age, but besides mere critique, postmodernism celebrates the very act of dismembering tradition. Postmodernism questions everything rationalist European philosophy held to be true, arguing that it is all contingent and that most cultural constructions have served the function of empowering members of a dominant social group at the expense of "others". Beginning in the mid-1980s,postmodernism emerged in art, architecture, music, flim, literature, sociology, communications, fashion, and other fields.
Postmodernism borrows from Modernism disillusionment with the givens of society : a penchant for Irony : the self- conscious "play" within the work of art: fragmentation and ambiguity and a destructured, decentered, dehumanized subject. But while Modernism, presented a fragmented view of human history, this fragmentation was seen as tragic. Frederick Jamson sees artistic movements like Modernism and postmodernism as cultural and are to extent constructed by it. Realism was the predominant style within eighteenth and nineteenth-century market capitalism, with its new technologies such as the stream engine that transformed every - day life. From the late nineteenth century through world war 2,Modernism ruled the arts within monopoly capitalism, associated with electricity and internal combustion. The third phase is dominated by global consumer capitalism, the emphasis is dominated by global consumer capitalism, the emphasis placed on advertising and selling goods, now called the Information age. Technology came in existence and slowly slowly revolution came in all the field. Changes came in every field. Change came in writing's field also.
The postmodernism is often applied to the literature and art after World War 2. When the effects on western morale of the first war were greatly exacerbated by the experience of Nazi totalitarianism and mass extermination, the threat of total destruction by the atomic bomb, the progressive devastation of the natural environment, and the ominous fact of overpopu. Postmodernism involves not only a continuation, sometimes carried to an extreme, of the counteraditional experiments of Modernism, but also diverse attempts to break away from Modernist forms which had, inevitably, become in their turn conventional, as well as to overthrow the elitism of Modernist "high art" by recourse to the models of "mass culture" in flim, television, newspaper, cartoons, and Popular music.
Societies must have order. Jean - Francois Lyotard argues that stability is maintained through "grand narratives" or "master narratives", stories a culture tells itself about its practice and beliefs in order to keep going. A grand narrative in American culture might be the story that democracy is the most enlightened or universal human happiness. But postmodernism, Lyotard afds, is characterized by "incredulity toward metanarratives" that serve to mask the contradictions and instabilities inherent in any social organization. Postmodernism prefers "mini-narratives" of local events. Similarly, Jean Baudrillard describes the "simulacra," of postmodern life which have taken the place of "real" objects. Think for example of video games or music compact discs, for made of original paintings or statues. Virtual reality games add another dimension to the artificiality of postmodern life. Perhaps postmodernism is best compared to the emergence of computer technology. For Baudrillard, postmodernism marks s culture composed "of disparate fragmentary experiences and images that constantly bombard the individual in music, video, television, advertising and other forms of electronic media. The lines between reality and artifice can become so blurred that reality TV is now hard to distinguish from reality - and from television entertainment.
2. Popular culture :-
Popular culture studies is the study of popular culture from a critical theory perspective combining communication studies and cultural studies. There was a time before the 1960s when popular culture was not studied by academics - when it was, well, just popular culture. But within American studies programms at the first and then later in many disciplines, including semiotics, rhetoric, literary criticism, flim studi, anthropology, history, women's studies, ethnic studies, and psychoanalytic approaches, critics examine such cultural media as pulp fiction, comic books, television, flim, advertising, popular music, and computer cyberculture. They assess how such factors as ethnicity, race, gender, class, age, region, and sexuality are shaped by and reshaped in popular culture. There are four main types of popular culture analyses : production analysis, texual analysis, audience analysis, and historical analysis.
In popular culture today what is more famous it becomes the subject of analysis. Through analysis we find why it ia popular and we finds there is a different reasons are there. There is a different reasons behind the interest.
The approach view culture as a narrative or story - telling process in which particular texts or cultural artifacts consciously or unconsciously link themselves to larger stories at play in the society. A key here is how texts create subject positions or identities for those who use them. Postmodernists tend to speak more of subject positions rather than the humanist notion of independent individuals. Production analysis asks the following kinds of questions : Who owns the media?, Who creates texts and Why?, Under what constraints?, How democratic or elitist is the production of popular culture?, what about works written only for money?, . Texual analysis examines how specific works of popular culture create meanings. Audience analysis asks how different groups of popular culture consumers, or users, make similar or different sense of the same texts. Historical analysis investigates how these other three dimensions change over time. Sometimes when book or movie published or realised at that time not get a instant success. But late on it becomes a part of popular culture. It is very interesting to finding the reason behind this gap or situations. This process is also very important. So it becomes a deep reading of events and situations.
popular culture is taken as a terrain of academic inquiry and has helped change the outlooks of more established disciplines. It broke down conceptual barriers between so-called high and low culture which led to people's escalated interest in popular culture and encompasses diverse media as comic books, television, and the Internet. Divisions between high and low culture have been increasingly seen as political distinctions rather than as defensible aesthetic or intellectual ones.
Name :- Rathod Nikita P.
Roll no :- 23
Enrolment no :- 2069108420190038
Semester :- M. A. Semester - 2
Year :- 2018-2020
Paper no :- 8 (Cultural Studies)
Assignment topic :- Postmodernism and Popular Culture
Email - id :- nikitarathod0101@gmail.com
Submitted to :- S. B. Gardi Department of English, Maharaja Krishankumarshinji Bhavanagar University.
(1) Postmodernism and Popular Culture.
=> postmodernism and Popular culture are the types of cultural studies.
1. Postmodernism :-
Postmodernism is a broad movement that developed in the mid- to late 20th century across philosophy, the arts, architecture, and criticism and that marked a departure from Modernism. The term has also more generally been applied to the historical era following modernity and the tendencies of this era.
While encompassing a wide variety of approaches, postmodernism is generally defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony, or rejection toward the meta-narratives and ideologies of modernism, often calling into question various assumptions of Enlightenment rationality.Consequently, common targets of postmodern critique include universalist notions of objective reality, morality, truth, human nature, reason, language, and social progress.Postmodern thinkers frequently call attention to the contingent or socially-conditioned nature of knowledge claims and value systems, situating them as products of particular political, historical, or cultural discourses and hierarchies. Accordingly, postmodern thought is broadly characterized by tendencies to self-referentiality, epistemological and moral relativism, pluralism, and irreverence.
Postmodern critical approaches gained purchase in the 1980s and 1990s, and have been adopted in a variety of academic and theoretical disciplines, including cultural studies, philosophy of science, economics, linguistics, architecture, feminist theory, and literary criticism, as well as art movements in fields such as literature and music. Postmodernism is often associated with schools of thought such as deconstruction and post-structuralism, as well as philosophers such as Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Fredric Jameson.
Postmodernism arose after World War II as a reaction to the perceived failings of modernism, whose radical artistic projects had come to be associated with totalitarianism or had been assimilated into mainstream culture. The basic features of what is now called postmodernism can be found as early as the 1940s, most notably in the work of artists such as Jorge Luis Borges. However, most scholars today would agree that postmodernism began to compete with modernism in the late 1950s and gained ascendancy over it in the 1960s. Since then, postmodernism has been a dominant, though not undisputed, force in art, literature, film, music, drama, architecture, history, and continental philosophy.
Salient features of postmodernism are normally thought to include the ironic play with styles, citations and narrative levels, a metaphysical skepticism or nihilism towards a "grand narrative" of Western culture, a preference for the virtual at the expense of the Real (or more accurately, a fundamental questioning of what 'the real' constitutes) and a "waning of affect" on the part of the subject, who is caught up in the free interplay of virtual, endlessly reproducible signs inducing a state of consciousness similar to schizophrenia.
Since the late 1990s there has been a small but growing feeling both in popular culture and in academia that postmodernism "has gone out of fashion".
Postmodernism, like post-structuralism and deconstruction, is a critique of the aesthetics of the preceding age, but besides mere critique, postmodernism celebrates the very act of dismembering tradition. Postmodernism questions everything rationalist European philosophy held to be true, arguing that it is all contingent and that most cultural constructions have served the function of empowering members of a dominant social group at the expense of "others". Beginning in the mid-1980s,postmodernism emerged in art, architecture, music, flim, literature, sociology, communications, fashion, and other fields.
Postmodernism borrows from Modernism disillusionment with the givens of society : a penchant for Irony : the self- conscious "play" within the work of art: fragmentation and ambiguity and a destructured, decentered, dehumanized subject. But while Modernism, presented a fragmented view of human history, this fragmentation was seen as tragic. Frederick Jamson sees artistic movements like Modernism and postmodernism as cultural and are to extent constructed by it. Realism was the predominant style within eighteenth and nineteenth-century market capitalism, with its new technologies such as the stream engine that transformed every - day life. From the late nineteenth century through world war 2,Modernism ruled the arts within monopoly capitalism, associated with electricity and internal combustion. The third phase is dominated by global consumer capitalism, the emphasis is dominated by global consumer capitalism, the emphasis placed on advertising and selling goods, now called the Information age. Technology came in existence and slowly slowly revolution came in all the field. Changes came in every field. Change came in writing's field also.
The postmodernism is often applied to the literature and art after World War 2. When the effects on western morale of the first war were greatly exacerbated by the experience of Nazi totalitarianism and mass extermination, the threat of total destruction by the atomic bomb, the progressive devastation of the natural environment, and the ominous fact of overpopu. Postmodernism involves not only a continuation, sometimes carried to an extreme, of the counteraditional experiments of Modernism, but also diverse attempts to break away from Modernist forms which had, inevitably, become in their turn conventional, as well as to overthrow the elitism of Modernist "high art" by recourse to the models of "mass culture" in flim, television, newspaper, cartoons, and Popular music.
Societies must have order. Jean - Francois Lyotard argues that stability is maintained through "grand narratives" or "master narratives", stories a culture tells itself about its practice and beliefs in order to keep going. A grand narrative in American culture might be the story that democracy is the most enlightened or universal human happiness. But postmodernism, Lyotard afds, is characterized by "incredulity toward metanarratives" that serve to mask the contradictions and instabilities inherent in any social organization. Postmodernism prefers "mini-narratives" of local events. Similarly, Jean Baudrillard describes the "simulacra," of postmodern life which have taken the place of "real" objects. Think for example of video games or music compact discs, for made of original paintings or statues. Virtual reality games add another dimension to the artificiality of postmodern life. Perhaps postmodernism is best compared to the emergence of computer technology. For Baudrillard, postmodernism marks s culture composed "of disparate fragmentary experiences and images that constantly bombard the individual in music, video, television, advertising and other forms of electronic media. The lines between reality and artifice can become so blurred that reality TV is now hard to distinguish from reality - and from television entertainment.
2. Popular culture :-
Popular culture studies is the study of popular culture from a critical theory perspective combining communication studies and cultural studies. There was a time before the 1960s when popular culture was not studied by academics - when it was, well, just popular culture. But within American studies programms at the first and then later in many disciplines, including semiotics, rhetoric, literary criticism, flim studi, anthropology, history, women's studies, ethnic studies, and psychoanalytic approaches, critics examine such cultural media as pulp fiction, comic books, television, flim, advertising, popular music, and computer cyberculture. They assess how such factors as ethnicity, race, gender, class, age, region, and sexuality are shaped by and reshaped in popular culture. There are four main types of popular culture analyses : production analysis, texual analysis, audience analysis, and historical analysis.
In popular culture today what is more famous it becomes the subject of analysis. Through analysis we find why it ia popular and we finds there is a different reasons are there. There is a different reasons behind the interest.
The approach view culture as a narrative or story - telling process in which particular texts or cultural artifacts consciously or unconsciously link themselves to larger stories at play in the society. A key here is how texts create subject positions or identities for those who use them. Postmodernists tend to speak more of subject positions rather than the humanist notion of independent individuals. Production analysis asks the following kinds of questions : Who owns the media?, Who creates texts and Why?, Under what constraints?, How democratic or elitist is the production of popular culture?, what about works written only for money?, . Texual analysis examines how specific works of popular culture create meanings. Audience analysis asks how different groups of popular culture consumers, or users, make similar or different sense of the same texts. Historical analysis investigates how these other three dimensions change over time. Sometimes when book or movie published or realised at that time not get a instant success. But late on it becomes a part of popular culture. It is very interesting to finding the reason behind this gap or situations. This process is also very important. So it becomes a deep reading of events and situations.
popular culture is taken as a terrain of academic inquiry and has helped change the outlooks of more established disciplines. It broke down conceptual barriers between so-called high and low culture which led to people's escalated interest in popular culture and encompasses diverse media as comic books, television, and the Internet. Divisions between high and low culture have been increasingly seen as political distinctions rather than as defensible aesthetic or intellectual ones.
T. S. Eliot : Traditional and Individual Talent
Assignment :- 7 T. S. Eliot : Traditional and Individual Talent
Name :- Rathod Nikita P.
Roll no :- 23
Enrolment no :- 2069108420190038
Semester :- M. A. Semester - 2
Year :- 2018-2020
Paper no :- 7 (Literary Theory and Criticism 2 (20th century Western and Indian poetics.)
Assignment topic :- T. S. Eliot : Tradition and Individual Talent
Email - id :- nikitarathod0101@gmail.com
Submitted to :- S. B. Gardi Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.
. (1) T. S Eliot: Tradition and Individual Talent
=> T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and Individual Talent" was published in 1919 in The Egoist - the Times Literary Supplement. Later, the essay was published in The sacred wood: Essay on poetry and Criticism in 1920/2. This essay is described by David Lodge as the most celebrated critical essay in the English of the 20th century. The essay is divided into three main sections:
1. The first gives us Eliot's Concept of tradition.
2. The second exemplifies his theory of depersonalization and poetry.
3. And In third part he concludes the debate by saying that the poet's sense of tradition and the impersonality of poetry are complementary things.
Poetry are complementary things. At the outset of the essay, Eliot asserts that the word 'tradition' is not a very favourable term with the English who generally utilize the same as a term of censure. The English do not possess an orientation towards criticism as the French do, they praise a poet for those aspects of the work that are individualistic. However, they fail to realize that the best and the most individual part of the poet's work is that reflects of the past tradition. This would amount to mere copying or slavish imitation. For, Eliot, Tradition has a three-fold significance. Firstly, tradition cannot be inherited and involves a great deal of labour and erudition. Secondly, it involves the historical sense which involves apperception not only of the pastness of the past, but also of its presence. Thirdly the historical sense enables a writer to write not only with his own generation in mind, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature from Homer down to the literature of his own country forms a continuous literary tradition. As claimed by Chris Baldick that Eliot had created an inverted literary history in which history being second to the permanent quality of literature, is readjusted to accommodate it to literature. Therefore, Eliot's conception of history is a dynamic one and not static: and is forever in a state of flux.
Eliot presents his conception of tradition and the definition of the poet and poetry in relation to it. He wishes to correct the fact that, as he perceives it, "in English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence." Eliot posits that, though the English tradition generally upholds the belief that art progresses through change – a separation from tradition, literary advancements are instead recognised only when they conform to the tradition. Eliot, a classicist, felt that the true incorporation of tradition into literature was unrecognised, that tradition, a word that "seldom... appear[s] except in a phrase of censure," was actually a thus-far unrealised element of literary criticism.
For Eliot, the term "tradition" is imbued with a special and complex character. It represents a "simultaneous order," by which Eliot means a historical timelessness – a fusion of past and present – and, at the same time, a sense of present temporality. A poet must embody "the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer," while, simultaneously, expressing their contemporary environment. Eliot challenges the common perception that a poet's greatness and individuality lie in their departure from their predecessors; he argues that "the most individual parts of his [the poet's] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously." Eliot claims that this "historical sense" is not only a resemblance to traditional works but an awareness and understanding of their relation to his poetry.
This fidelity to tradition, however, does not require the great poet to forfeit novelty in an act of surrender to repetition. Rather, Eliot has a much more dynamic and progressive conception of the poetic process: novelty is possible only through tapping into tradition. When a poet engages in the creation of new work, they realise an aesthetic "ideal order," as it has been established by the literary tradition that has come before them. As such, the act of artistic creation does not take place in a vacuum. The introduction of a new work alters the cohesion of this existing order, and causes a readjustment of the old to accommodate the new. The inclusion of the new work alters the way in which the past is seen; elements of the past that are noted and realised. In Eliot’s own words, "What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art that preceded it." Eliot refers to this organic tradition, this developing canon, as the "mind of Europe." The private mind is subsumed by this more massive one.
This leads to Eliot’s so-called "Impersonal Theory" of poetry. Since the poet engages in a "continual surrender of himself" to the vast order of tradition, artistic creation is a process of depersonalisation. The mature poet is viewed as a medium, through which tradition is channelled and elaborated. They compare the poet to a catalyst in a chemical reaction, in which the reactants are feelings and emotions that are synthesised to create an artistic image that captures and relays these same feelings and emotions. While the mind of the poet is necessary for the production, it emerges unaffected by the process. The artist stores feelings and emotions and properly unites them into a specific combination, which is the artistic product. What lends greatness to a work of art are not the feelings and emotions themselves, but the nature of the artistic process by which they are synthesised. The artist is responsible for creating "the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place." And, it is the intensity of fusion that renders art great. In this view, Eliot rejects the theory that art expresses metaphysical unity in the soul of the poet. The poet is a depersonalised vessel, a mere medium.
He looks in new way. He gives a new concept of tradition. He defence the importance of tradition. Tradition and Individual Talent are not separate entity. Pastness of past and historical sense both are important. To appreciates work poem rather than poet is very important. Poetry is a drpersonalized work of art. Writer kills himself in his works is very important. When poets or writer creates his works at that time he is present in his work. But when product is created at that time poet is not present. Tradition is not dead but it is alive. Great works do not express the personal emotion of the poet. The poet does not reveal their own unique and novel emotions, but rather, by drawing on ordinary ones and channelling them through the intensity of poetry, they express feelings that surpass, altogether, experienced emotion. This is what Eliot intends when he discusses poetry as an "escape from emotion." Since successful poetry is impersonal and, therefore, exists independent of its poet, it outlives the poet and can incorporate into the timeless "ideal order" of the "living" literary tradition.
The theory is that the expression of emotion in art can be achieved by a specific, and almost formulaic, prescription of a set of objects, including events and situations. A particular emotion is created by presenting its correlated objective sign. The author is depersonalised in this conception, since he is the mere effecter of the sign. And, it is the sign, and not the poet, which creates emotion.The implications here separate Eliot's idea of talent from the conventional definition (just as his idea of Tradition is separate from the conventional definition), one so far from it, perhaps, that he chooses never to directly label it as talent. Whereas the conventional definition of talent, especially in the arts, is a genius that one is born with. Not so for Eliot. Instead, talent is acquired through a careful study of poetry, claiming that Tradition, "cannot be inherited, and if you want it, you must obtain it by great labour." Eliot asserts that it is absolutely necessary for the poet to study, to have an understanding of the poets before them, and to be well versed enough that they can understand and incorporate the "mind of Europe" into their poetry. But the poet's study is unique – it is knowledge that "does not encroach," and that does not "deaden or pervert poetic sensibility." It is, to put it most simply, a poetic knowledge – knowledge observed through a poetic lens. This ideal implies that knowledge gleaned by a poet is not knowledge of facts, but knowledge which leads to a greater understanding of the mind of Europe. As a critic T. S. Eliot was very practical. He called himself "a classicist in literature". According to Eliot, a critic mast obey the objective standards to analyze any work. Eliot demands, from any critic, ability for judgement and powerful liberty of mind to identify and to interpret.
Name :- Rathod Nikita P.
Roll no :- 23
Enrolment no :- 2069108420190038
Semester :- M. A. Semester - 2
Year :- 2018-2020
Paper no :- 7 (Literary Theory and Criticism 2 (20th century Western and Indian poetics.)
Assignment topic :- T. S. Eliot : Tradition and Individual Talent
Email - id :- nikitarathod0101@gmail.com
Submitted to :- S. B. Gardi Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.
. (1) T. S Eliot: Tradition and Individual Talent
=> T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and Individual Talent" was published in 1919 in The Egoist - the Times Literary Supplement. Later, the essay was published in The sacred wood: Essay on poetry and Criticism in 1920/2. This essay is described by David Lodge as the most celebrated critical essay in the English of the 20th century. The essay is divided into three main sections:
1. The first gives us Eliot's Concept of tradition.
2. The second exemplifies his theory of depersonalization and poetry.
3. And In third part he concludes the debate by saying that the poet's sense of tradition and the impersonality of poetry are complementary things.
Poetry are complementary things. At the outset of the essay, Eliot asserts that the word 'tradition' is not a very favourable term with the English who generally utilize the same as a term of censure. The English do not possess an orientation towards criticism as the French do, they praise a poet for those aspects of the work that are individualistic. However, they fail to realize that the best and the most individual part of the poet's work is that reflects of the past tradition. This would amount to mere copying or slavish imitation. For, Eliot, Tradition has a three-fold significance. Firstly, tradition cannot be inherited and involves a great deal of labour and erudition. Secondly, it involves the historical sense which involves apperception not only of the pastness of the past, but also of its presence. Thirdly the historical sense enables a writer to write not only with his own generation in mind, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature from Homer down to the literature of his own country forms a continuous literary tradition. As claimed by Chris Baldick that Eliot had created an inverted literary history in which history being second to the permanent quality of literature, is readjusted to accommodate it to literature. Therefore, Eliot's conception of history is a dynamic one and not static: and is forever in a state of flux.
Eliot presents his conception of tradition and the definition of the poet and poetry in relation to it. He wishes to correct the fact that, as he perceives it, "in English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence." Eliot posits that, though the English tradition generally upholds the belief that art progresses through change – a separation from tradition, literary advancements are instead recognised only when they conform to the tradition. Eliot, a classicist, felt that the true incorporation of tradition into literature was unrecognised, that tradition, a word that "seldom... appear[s] except in a phrase of censure," was actually a thus-far unrealised element of literary criticism.
For Eliot, the term "tradition" is imbued with a special and complex character. It represents a "simultaneous order," by which Eliot means a historical timelessness – a fusion of past and present – and, at the same time, a sense of present temporality. A poet must embody "the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer," while, simultaneously, expressing their contemporary environment. Eliot challenges the common perception that a poet's greatness and individuality lie in their departure from their predecessors; he argues that "the most individual parts of his [the poet's] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously." Eliot claims that this "historical sense" is not only a resemblance to traditional works but an awareness and understanding of their relation to his poetry.
This fidelity to tradition, however, does not require the great poet to forfeit novelty in an act of surrender to repetition. Rather, Eliot has a much more dynamic and progressive conception of the poetic process: novelty is possible only through tapping into tradition. When a poet engages in the creation of new work, they realise an aesthetic "ideal order," as it has been established by the literary tradition that has come before them. As such, the act of artistic creation does not take place in a vacuum. The introduction of a new work alters the cohesion of this existing order, and causes a readjustment of the old to accommodate the new. The inclusion of the new work alters the way in which the past is seen; elements of the past that are noted and realised. In Eliot’s own words, "What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art that preceded it." Eliot refers to this organic tradition, this developing canon, as the "mind of Europe." The private mind is subsumed by this more massive one.
This leads to Eliot’s so-called "Impersonal Theory" of poetry. Since the poet engages in a "continual surrender of himself" to the vast order of tradition, artistic creation is a process of depersonalisation. The mature poet is viewed as a medium, through which tradition is channelled and elaborated. They compare the poet to a catalyst in a chemical reaction, in which the reactants are feelings and emotions that are synthesised to create an artistic image that captures and relays these same feelings and emotions. While the mind of the poet is necessary for the production, it emerges unaffected by the process. The artist stores feelings and emotions and properly unites them into a specific combination, which is the artistic product. What lends greatness to a work of art are not the feelings and emotions themselves, but the nature of the artistic process by which they are synthesised. The artist is responsible for creating "the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place." And, it is the intensity of fusion that renders art great. In this view, Eliot rejects the theory that art expresses metaphysical unity in the soul of the poet. The poet is a depersonalised vessel, a mere medium.
He looks in new way. He gives a new concept of tradition. He defence the importance of tradition. Tradition and Individual Talent are not separate entity. Pastness of past and historical sense both are important. To appreciates work poem rather than poet is very important. Poetry is a drpersonalized work of art. Writer kills himself in his works is very important. When poets or writer creates his works at that time he is present in his work. But when product is created at that time poet is not present. Tradition is not dead but it is alive. Great works do not express the personal emotion of the poet. The poet does not reveal their own unique and novel emotions, but rather, by drawing on ordinary ones and channelling them through the intensity of poetry, they express feelings that surpass, altogether, experienced emotion. This is what Eliot intends when he discusses poetry as an "escape from emotion." Since successful poetry is impersonal and, therefore, exists independent of its poet, it outlives the poet and can incorporate into the timeless "ideal order" of the "living" literary tradition.
The theory is that the expression of emotion in art can be achieved by a specific, and almost formulaic, prescription of a set of objects, including events and situations. A particular emotion is created by presenting its correlated objective sign. The author is depersonalised in this conception, since he is the mere effecter of the sign. And, it is the sign, and not the poet, which creates emotion.The implications here separate Eliot's idea of talent from the conventional definition (just as his idea of Tradition is separate from the conventional definition), one so far from it, perhaps, that he chooses never to directly label it as talent. Whereas the conventional definition of talent, especially in the arts, is a genius that one is born with. Not so for Eliot. Instead, talent is acquired through a careful study of poetry, claiming that Tradition, "cannot be inherited, and if you want it, you must obtain it by great labour." Eliot asserts that it is absolutely necessary for the poet to study, to have an understanding of the poets before them, and to be well versed enough that they can understand and incorporate the "mind of Europe" into their poetry. But the poet's study is unique – it is knowledge that "does not encroach," and that does not "deaden or pervert poetic sensibility." It is, to put it most simply, a poetic knowledge – knowledge observed through a poetic lens. This ideal implies that knowledge gleaned by a poet is not knowledge of facts, but knowledge which leads to a greater understanding of the mind of Europe. As a critic T. S. Eliot was very practical. He called himself "a classicist in literature". According to Eliot, a critic mast obey the objective standards to analyze any work. Eliot demands, from any critic, ability for judgement and powerful liberty of mind to identify and to interpret.
Character Of Oliver Twist
Assignment :- 6 Character Of Oliver Twist
Name :- Rathod Nikita P.
Roll no :- 23
Enrolment no :- 2069108420190038
Semester :- M. A. Semester - 2
Year :- 2018-2020
Paper no :- 6 (The Victorian Literature)
Assignment topic :- Chracter of Oliver Twist
Email - id :- nikitarathod0101@gmail.com
Submitted to :- S. B. Gardi Department of English, Maharaja Krishankumarshinji Bhavanagar University.
(1) Character of Oliver Twist.
=> Oliver Twist is novel written by Charles Dickens. He was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best - known fictional chracters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the 20th century critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are still widely read today.
In Oliver twist, Oliver is a main character. Whole story is around him. Oliver twist is born in a workhouse to an unmarried woman called Agnes Fleming who dies giving birth to him. The story takes off when Oliver is twelve years old and he is deemed old enough work. A series of circumstances propel him from a poorhouse to an undertakers as an apprentice and finally to the corrupt parts of London where he unwittingly joinsa gang of pickpockets and thieves. Portrayed as an extremely naive child he does not realise that he is being put through training to become a pickpocket until he watches two of Fagin's boys in the act. He is captured by mistake for their crime and is soon released to Mr. Brownlow who takes care of him. Recaptured by Fagin's gang, the reader gets to see his innate aversion to crime especially in the incidents where he wishes to return Mr. Brownlow's money and books and much later when he decides to warn the inmates of the house he is forced to help rob. Oliver retains an innocence that cannot be corrupted despite the evil situations he is drawn into and this renders him, as several critics have pointed out, unbelievable. Oliver's incorruptibility is a source of consternation of Fagin and Oliver's half brother Monks, who try to make him a thief and thus deprive him of the fortune willed to him by his late father. They fail as Oliver is under the protection of the Maylies who then join forces with Mr. Brownlow to protect him from his corrupt brother. Nevertheless, he is a rather flat character who is uniformly good and is more an instrument to move the plot forward rather than effecting changes on his own.
Oliver is a orphan child. He is innocent. He is kind hearted person. Mr. Bumble is the beadle at the workhouse where Oliver is taken to when he is twelve years old : in fact he has been associated with the boy right at birth for he is responsible for having Christened him with the name 'Twist'. A greedy, hypocritical and self - important man, he preaches morality and yet is unwarrantedly cruel to the pauppers under his care, inflicting corporeal punishment upon them and taking pleasure in doing so. He later marries with Mrs. Corney who is equally materialistic and callous. They both from an alliance with Monks and aid in destroying all remaining evidence of oliver's parentage. Dickens attacks the poor laws of the time through a stringent critique of the poorhouses and workhouses and particularly the people who ran these institutions. In an ironic twist of fate the Bumbles end up paupers in the same poorhouse they lorded over, contributing to the theme of poetic justice that Dickens seems to work through the novel.
As the child hero of a melodramatic novel of social protest, Oliver Twist is meant to appeal more to our sentiments than to our literary sensibilities. On many levels, Oliver is not a believable character, because although he is raised in corrupt surroundings, his purity and virtue are absolute. Throughout the novel, Dickens uses Oliver’s character to challenge the Victorian idea that paupers and criminals are already evil at birth, arguing instead that a corrupt environment is the source of vice. At the same time, Oliver’s incorruptibility undermines some of Dickens’s assertions. Oliver is shocked and horrified when he sees the Artful Dodger and Charley Bates pick a stranger’s pocket and again when he is forced to participate in a burglary. Oliver’s moral scruples about the sanctity of property seem inborn in him, just as Dickens’s opponents thought that corruption is inborn in poor people. Furthermore, other pauper children use rough Cockney slang, but Oliver, oddly enough, speaks in proper King’s English. His grammatical fastidiousness is also inexplicable, as Oliver presumably is not well-educated. Even when he is abused and manipulated, Oliver does not become angry or indignant. When Sikes and Crackit force him to assist in a robbery, Oliver merely begs to be allowed to “run away and die in the fields.” Oliver does not present a complex picture of a person torn between good and evil—instead, he is goodness incarnate.
Even if we might feel that Dickens’s social criticism would have been more effective if he had focused on a more complex poor character, like the Artful Dodger or Nancy, the audience for whom Dickens was writing might not have been receptive to such a portrayal. Dickens’s Victorian middle-class readers were likely to hold opinions on the poor that were only a little less extreme than those expressed by Mr. Bumble, the beadle who treats paupers with great cruelty. In fact, Oliver Twist was criticized for portraying thieves and prostitutes at all. Given the strict morals of Dickens’s audience, it may have seemed necessary for him to make Oliver a saintlike figure. Because Oliver appealed to Victorian readers’ sentiments, his story may have stood a better chance of effectively challenging their prejudices.
The Artful Dodger is a favourite of and one of the most accomplished of Fagin's pickpockets and has the added distinction of having introduced Oliver twist to Fagin. And Rose Maylie is the ward of Mrs Maylie and she is revealed to be oliver's aunt, his mother Agnes's sister. Monks or Edward Leeford is the half - brother of Oliver Twist and the legitimate son of Oliver's father. A vicious man, slightly crippled and prone to frequent attacks of epilepsy, he hates Oliver and attempts to turn him into a thief to prevent him from getting his rightful share of his father's property. Mr.Brownlow adopts Oliver. He is also kind hearted person. He takes care of Oliver. Oliver's like a company of Mr. Brownlow. Mrs. Bedwin is a housekeeper of Mr. Brownlow. She also takes care of Oliver.
He was the first child protagonist in an English novel. His generosity of spirit is total, and even when faced with serious maltreatment, he never loses his sense of morality or kindness. Oliver Twist is notable for its unromantic portrayal by Dickens of criminals and their sordid lives, as well as for exposing the cruel treatment of the many orphans in London in the mid-19th century.In this early example of the social novel, Dickens satirises the hypocrisies of his time, including child labour, the recruitment of children as criminals, and the presence of street children.The novel may have been inspired by the story of Robert Blincoe, an orphan whose account of working as a child labourer in a cotton mill was widely read in the 1830s. It is likely that Dickens's own youthful experiences contributed as well.
Oliver is a child that's why he does not know anything. He is completely unknown to the world. That's why he easily becomes the part of pickpocketers. He does know about the situation that happens around him. For him it is completely new and strenge experience. So that's why he learns through that situation are happens around him. He becomes the part of this incidents unknowingly. In the novel is works in workhouse. And Mr. Bumble is a master of workhouse. He is very strick. And when Oliver wants some more food. At that time he is angry on Oliver. Mr. Bumble behaves with children very strictly. They work hard but they does not get enough food to eat. That's why children's are lives in very bad condition. Every child of workhouse has fear of Mr. Bumble. They feels fears. Nobody raises their voice against this situation. Because they feels a fear for punishment. That's why no one can raise their authority. And In another situation Fagin is a mast of this gang. He orders and childrens are follow his rules. And same Oliver also works in this direction. And when Dogger tries to steals the handkerchief of Mr. Brownlow and he captured by people. And the blame goes on the Oliver. And he goes in with the people. And he tries to proves himself as innocent but he fails to proves himself as innocent. At that time Mr. Brownlow understands him. And he believes in oliver's words. And then Oliver proves innocent. And goes with Mr. Brownlow.
Charles Dickens wrote in very humour way. He portrays the characters in very humorous way. That's why it creates a comic atmosphere for readers. And that's why he satires in very humorous way. He satire on the situation of society. That's why through his writing style he gives a comic relief to the audience and also criticise the situation of society. .
Name :- Rathod Nikita P.
Roll no :- 23
Enrolment no :- 2069108420190038
Semester :- M. A. Semester - 2
Year :- 2018-2020
Paper no :- 6 (The Victorian Literature)
Assignment topic :- Chracter of Oliver Twist
Email - id :- nikitarathod0101@gmail.com
Submitted to :- S. B. Gardi Department of English, Maharaja Krishankumarshinji Bhavanagar University.
(1) Character of Oliver Twist.
=> Oliver Twist is novel written by Charles Dickens. He was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best - known fictional chracters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the 20th century critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are still widely read today.
In Oliver twist, Oliver is a main character. Whole story is around him. Oliver twist is born in a workhouse to an unmarried woman called Agnes Fleming who dies giving birth to him. The story takes off when Oliver is twelve years old and he is deemed old enough work. A series of circumstances propel him from a poorhouse to an undertakers as an apprentice and finally to the corrupt parts of London where he unwittingly joinsa gang of pickpockets and thieves. Portrayed as an extremely naive child he does not realise that he is being put through training to become a pickpocket until he watches two of Fagin's boys in the act. He is captured by mistake for their crime and is soon released to Mr. Brownlow who takes care of him. Recaptured by Fagin's gang, the reader gets to see his innate aversion to crime especially in the incidents where he wishes to return Mr. Brownlow's money and books and much later when he decides to warn the inmates of the house he is forced to help rob. Oliver retains an innocence that cannot be corrupted despite the evil situations he is drawn into and this renders him, as several critics have pointed out, unbelievable. Oliver's incorruptibility is a source of consternation of Fagin and Oliver's half brother Monks, who try to make him a thief and thus deprive him of the fortune willed to him by his late father. They fail as Oliver is under the protection of the Maylies who then join forces with Mr. Brownlow to protect him from his corrupt brother. Nevertheless, he is a rather flat character who is uniformly good and is more an instrument to move the plot forward rather than effecting changes on his own.
Oliver is a orphan child. He is innocent. He is kind hearted person. Mr. Bumble is the beadle at the workhouse where Oliver is taken to when he is twelve years old : in fact he has been associated with the boy right at birth for he is responsible for having Christened him with the name 'Twist'. A greedy, hypocritical and self - important man, he preaches morality and yet is unwarrantedly cruel to the pauppers under his care, inflicting corporeal punishment upon them and taking pleasure in doing so. He later marries with Mrs. Corney who is equally materialistic and callous. They both from an alliance with Monks and aid in destroying all remaining evidence of oliver's parentage. Dickens attacks the poor laws of the time through a stringent critique of the poorhouses and workhouses and particularly the people who ran these institutions. In an ironic twist of fate the Bumbles end up paupers in the same poorhouse they lorded over, contributing to the theme of poetic justice that Dickens seems to work through the novel.
As the child hero of a melodramatic novel of social protest, Oliver Twist is meant to appeal more to our sentiments than to our literary sensibilities. On many levels, Oliver is not a believable character, because although he is raised in corrupt surroundings, his purity and virtue are absolute. Throughout the novel, Dickens uses Oliver’s character to challenge the Victorian idea that paupers and criminals are already evil at birth, arguing instead that a corrupt environment is the source of vice. At the same time, Oliver’s incorruptibility undermines some of Dickens’s assertions. Oliver is shocked and horrified when he sees the Artful Dodger and Charley Bates pick a stranger’s pocket and again when he is forced to participate in a burglary. Oliver’s moral scruples about the sanctity of property seem inborn in him, just as Dickens’s opponents thought that corruption is inborn in poor people. Furthermore, other pauper children use rough Cockney slang, but Oliver, oddly enough, speaks in proper King’s English. His grammatical fastidiousness is also inexplicable, as Oliver presumably is not well-educated. Even when he is abused and manipulated, Oliver does not become angry or indignant. When Sikes and Crackit force him to assist in a robbery, Oliver merely begs to be allowed to “run away and die in the fields.” Oliver does not present a complex picture of a person torn between good and evil—instead, he is goodness incarnate.
Even if we might feel that Dickens’s social criticism would have been more effective if he had focused on a more complex poor character, like the Artful Dodger or Nancy, the audience for whom Dickens was writing might not have been receptive to such a portrayal. Dickens’s Victorian middle-class readers were likely to hold opinions on the poor that were only a little less extreme than those expressed by Mr. Bumble, the beadle who treats paupers with great cruelty. In fact, Oliver Twist was criticized for portraying thieves and prostitutes at all. Given the strict morals of Dickens’s audience, it may have seemed necessary for him to make Oliver a saintlike figure. Because Oliver appealed to Victorian readers’ sentiments, his story may have stood a better chance of effectively challenging their prejudices.
The Artful Dodger is a favourite of and one of the most accomplished of Fagin's pickpockets and has the added distinction of having introduced Oliver twist to Fagin. And Rose Maylie is the ward of Mrs Maylie and she is revealed to be oliver's aunt, his mother Agnes's sister. Monks or Edward Leeford is the half - brother of Oliver Twist and the legitimate son of Oliver's father. A vicious man, slightly crippled and prone to frequent attacks of epilepsy, he hates Oliver and attempts to turn him into a thief to prevent him from getting his rightful share of his father's property. Mr.Brownlow adopts Oliver. He is also kind hearted person. He takes care of Oliver. Oliver's like a company of Mr. Brownlow. Mrs. Bedwin is a housekeeper of Mr. Brownlow. She also takes care of Oliver.
He was the first child protagonist in an English novel. His generosity of spirit is total, and even when faced with serious maltreatment, he never loses his sense of morality or kindness. Oliver Twist is notable for its unromantic portrayal by Dickens of criminals and their sordid lives, as well as for exposing the cruel treatment of the many orphans in London in the mid-19th century.In this early example of the social novel, Dickens satirises the hypocrisies of his time, including child labour, the recruitment of children as criminals, and the presence of street children.The novel may have been inspired by the story of Robert Blincoe, an orphan whose account of working as a child labourer in a cotton mill was widely read in the 1830s. It is likely that Dickens's own youthful experiences contributed as well.
Oliver is a child that's why he does not know anything. He is completely unknown to the world. That's why he easily becomes the part of pickpocketers. He does know about the situation that happens around him. For him it is completely new and strenge experience. So that's why he learns through that situation are happens around him. He becomes the part of this incidents unknowingly. In the novel is works in workhouse. And Mr. Bumble is a master of workhouse. He is very strick. And when Oliver wants some more food. At that time he is angry on Oliver. Mr. Bumble behaves with children very strictly. They work hard but they does not get enough food to eat. That's why children's are lives in very bad condition. Every child of workhouse has fear of Mr. Bumble. They feels fears. Nobody raises their voice against this situation. Because they feels a fear for punishment. That's why no one can raise their authority. And In another situation Fagin is a mast of this gang. He orders and childrens are follow his rules. And same Oliver also works in this direction. And when Dogger tries to steals the handkerchief of Mr. Brownlow and he captured by people. And the blame goes on the Oliver. And he goes in with the people. And he tries to proves himself as innocent but he fails to proves himself as innocent. At that time Mr. Brownlow understands him. And he believes in oliver's words. And then Oliver proves innocent. And goes with Mr. Brownlow.
Charles Dickens wrote in very humour way. He portrays the characters in very humorous way. That's why it creates a comic atmosphere for readers. And that's why he satires in very humorous way. He satire on the situation of society. That's why through his writing style he gives a comic relief to the audience and also criticise the situation of society. .
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