Wednesday, 8 November 2017
Sunday, 29 October 2017
Paper No: 12 English Language Teaching - 1
To evaluate my assignment please click here.
Name: Mehta Kavita Dineshbhai
Course: M.A English
Semester: 3
Batch: 2016 – 2018
Roll No: 11
Enrollment No: 2069108420170020
Submitted to: S M T S.B Gardi
Department Of English
MK Bhav University.
Email id: kavitamehta164@gmail.com
Paper No: 12: English Language
Teaching-1
Topic: Bilingualism
My Assignment’s
Bilingualism:
“Bilingualism range from a minimal proficiency in two
languages, to an advanced level of proficiency which allows the speaker to function
and appear as a native-like speaker of two languages. A person may describe
themselves as bilingual but may mean only the ability to
converse and communicate orally.”
What is
bilingualism? :
“Defining bilingualism in just a few words is not easy, as each
individual has different bilingual characteristics. There may be
distinctions between ability and use of a language, or differences in
proficiency between the two languages.”
Bilingualism refers to the phenomenon of competence and
communication in two languages. A bilingual individual is someone who has the
ability to communicate in two languages alternately. Such an ability or
psychological state in the individual has been referred to as bilinguality. A
bilingual society is one of in which two languages are used for communication.
In a bilingual society, it is possible to have a large number of monolinguals (those
who speck only one of the two languages used in the society), provided that
there are enough bilinguals to perform the function between individual
bilingualism and societal bilingualism.
Apart from bilingualism abilities involving two languages:
1) Bidialectal
2) Biscription
Bidialectalism refers to the phenomenon whereby someone can
communicate in more than two dialects of the same language. Example for,
Cantonese and Putonghua for a Chinese speaker. Biscriptural competence is the
ability to read more than one script of the same language, Example for: the Chinese
language can be written both in the new simplified script and the traditional
complex script.
BILINGUALISM
AND MULTILINGUALISM:
The final definition issue concerns the relationship
between bilingualism and multilingualism. Discussion of bilingualism often
include multilingual context, because in many multilingual societies there are
more bilingual than multilingual individuals. There are many pattern of
multilingual based on various combination of bilingual competencies. For
example, individuals in a multilingual society could be bilingual in the
dominant language and the another non – dominant language. The non – dominant
language may vary for individuals. Increasingly, however, with the recognition
that many societies are multilingual. Multilingualism is often discussed as a
phenomenon in its own right.
A multifaceted phenomenon, bilingualism requires
multidisciplinary investigation for it to be more completely understood. In
their attempt at linguistic representation, linguistic descriptions of
languages have often disregarded bilingual. Until recently, lingual consideration,
focusing instead on the monolingual speaker hearer competence in the language. Recently,
however, with the emergence of sociolingualistic concerns in the late 1950s and
the renewed interest in variation studies as a whole, language change arising
from the use of two or more language in a society is now studies with greater
vigor. Bilingualism is now directly linked with studies in contact linguistic.
The bilingual individual is now recognized as the ultimate locus of contact and
accepted as one of the agents of language change arising from contact
situations.
Psycholinguistic studies of
bilingualism have asked question such as:
·
How do we
become bilingual?
·
How are the
two languages represented in the
Bilingual brail?
·
What happen
in real time when a bilingual communicates?
To the answer the question of how someone become bilingual.
It is useful to draw a distinction between simultaneous and successive
bilingualism.Simultaneous bilingualism refers to the acquisition of two
languages at the same time, while successive bilingualism refers to the
acquision of the one language after another. In the latter, the first language
(L1) will have been established in some way before the learner is exposed to
the second language (L2). To distinguish between the two, McLaughlin uses the
operational definition that if two languages are acquired below three year old,
then it is considered simultaneous bilingualism with both languages acquired as
L1s; if the learner only starts learning the L2 after three tear old, then it
is defined as successive bilingualism. The learner of the L2 in successive
bilingualism is also referred to as second language acquisition.
Several governments around the world
have attempted to provide bilingual education: Education using billings as media
of instruction and having bilingualism as a goal of education. Educations are
connected about the types of teaching programmes and classroom techniques that
can facilitate the development of bilingual abilities. A whole range of
bilingual education models is now available. Some of these models can encourage
maintenance of the non dominant languages, while other are likely to lead to
language shift. If becoming bilingual helps learner to developed positive
attitude to their native languages and themselves, the phenomenon is called
dditive bilingualism. If they develop negative attitude towards then own
language in the process of becoming bilingual, then it is called subtractive
bilingualism. Some researcher have related these positive and negative attitude
cognitive advantages. In bilingual education , which in turn was the result of
a mixture of interacting effects from post-war population movements, post
colonial language policies and the the propagation of humanistic and
egalitarian ideologies.
With population movement s occurring in various part
of the world for two or three decades after the second World war, laws were
passed in some countries to allow members of non- dominant groups to learn in
their own languages while at same time trying to learn the dominant language.
In America, the Bilingual Education Act was passed in 1968, while in Canada the
Official Languages Act was adapted in 1969. Though not a center for immigration
as America has been in recent decades, the People’s Republic of china has 55
minorities or non- dominant groups. Soon after the establishment of the present
government in 1949. China passed legislation from the 1950s onwards to provide
for education in the non dominant languages while encouraging, but not
requiring, some of these speakers to learn Putonghua. The national mode of
communication. Likewise, in multilingual India the three Language formula (the
regional language and the mother tongue- Hindi or another India language – and
English or a modern European language) was first devised in 1956 and modified
in 1961. Similar events took place in other countries well in to the 1970s.
It is important to note the historical background to studies of bilingual education because
it sheds light on their motivation and expected outcomes. Many of the early
studies in bilingualism were case studies of particular countries or
communities, involving an appreciation of history, politics and demography. The
International Handbook of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education, is one of the
most comprehensive research efforts document the circumstances in countries
such as China, India, South Africa, the UK. Other studies appearing from the
1980s include Paulson on Sweden, Shapson, and D’opration and Developnt
countries and Baetens Beardsmore on Europe. As part of many pilot programmes in
bilingual education, model for facilitating bilingual development in schools
have been developed. A review of all the model developed shows that they hinge
on two main issues:
·
Whether the non-dominant language is used as a
medium of instruction.
·
Whether the
non-dominant language is valued as a cultural asset worth acquiring for self.
These two parameters can be used to categories a whole
range of bilingual education models. Four examples illustrate this.
1. The
submersion model of bilingual education: the non-dominant language is neither
valued nor used as a medium of instruction.
2. Transitional bilingualism: the non-dominant
language is not used as a medium of instruction for a period but is not
eventually valued as a target language.
3. Heritage language programmes: the non-dominant
language is not used as a medium of instruction but is valued as a target
language to be learned.
4. The language exposure time model the learner’s own
language is valued as a target language and also used also used as a medium of
instruction for some subjects.
Research in bilingualism in the 1980s, there are several introductory
texts to the field such as Baetens Beardsmore, Alatis and Staczek, Cummins and
swain, Baker and Hamers and Blanc.Other new books include Hoffman and in
primary or secondary school setting, there is also a body of research for
sub-areas, such as bilingualism and language contact, cognitive processing in
bilinguals and even what parents can do at home to help children become
bilingual.
When one
more components in two languages become fused in to one code for communication,
then there is change in the linguistic system themselves this phenomenon is
called language conversation. The systematic merging of forms between languages
which are in the same geographical speech area or sprachbund. Complete merging
of two languages may result in mixed languages may result in mixed languages
such as pidgins mixed languages with no native speaker or creoles. It is
possible therefore that societal bilingualism over time may give rise to the
emergence of a mixed language which in turn may become the common mode of
communication.
Another
approach to the study of language mixing is to consider what happen in the
bilingual’s brain. One of the first attempts was Weinreich’s delmeation of
bilingual memory organization. In weinreich’s model there are three types of
bilingual memory systems:
1. Coexistent bilingualism
2. Merged bilingualism
3. Subordinative bilingualism
In the first type, the two language are kept separate , in the second
the representation of the two languages are integrated in to one system, in the
last ,L2 is based on the representation of L1.It has been postulated that the
way the memory organize the two languages is related to how they are acquired.
In the first type , the languages are kept apart in the memory system because
they are learned in different environments in the second type, bilingual have
acquired the languages while using them interchangeably, in the last, L2 is
lerned on the basis of L1. Ervin and Osgood refer to the first as co-ordinate
bilingualism and the second as compound bilingualism. They consider the third
type as a form of the second type since the mental representation of L2 are
based on L1 and are therefore not separately stored.
Conclusion:
The multifaceted nature of the phenomenon of
bilingualism need to be fully appreciated for any pedagogical programme
designed to foster bilingual development to succeed. To study bilingualism is
to study the interaction between linguistics, psycholinguistics,
sociolinguistics, pedagogy and the real world of language politics and policy.
To be able to appreciate such interaction in changing times and adjust
classroom practice in the light of changes is the hallmark of a professional
language teacher.
Work cited:
To evaluate my assignment please click here.
Paper No 11: Postcolonial Literature.
To evaluate my assignment please click here.
Name: Mehta Kavita Dineshbhai
(Bill Ashcroft, 2000)
To evaluate my assignment please click here.
Name: Mehta Kavita Dineshbhai
Course: M.A English
Semester: 3
Batch: 2016 – 2018
Roll No: 11
Enrollment No:2069108420170020
Submitted to: S M T S.B Gardi
Department Of English
MK Bhav University.
Email id: kavitamehta164@gmail.com
Paper No: 11: The Postcolonial
Literature.
Topic: Some key term in
Postcolonialism
My Assignment’s
Postcolonialism:
Postcolonialism is an
academic discipline that analyzes, explains, and responds to the cultural
legacy of colonialism and imperialism. Postcolonialism speaks about the human consequences of
external control and economic exploitation of native people and their lands. The term "Postcolonialism" refers broadly to the
ways in which race, ethnicity, culture, and human identity itself are
represented in the modern era, after many colonized countries gained their
independence. Postcolonialism, the historical period or state of affairs
representing the aftermath of western colonialism; the term can also be used to
describe the concurrent project to reclaim and rethink the history and agency of
people subordinated under various form of imperialism.
However,
some critics use the term to refer to all culture and cultural
products influenced by imperialism from the moment of colonization until the twenty-first
century. Postcolonial literature seeks to describe the interactions between
European nations and the peoples they colonized. By the middle of the twentieth
century, the vast majority of the world was under the control of European
countries. At its peak in the late nineteenth century, according to The
Norton Anthology of English Literature, the British Empire consisted
of "more than a quarter of all the territory on the surface of the earth:
one in four people was a subject of Queen Victoria." During the twentieth
century, countries such as India, Jamaica, Nigeria, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Canada,
and Australia won independence from their European colonizers. The literature
and art produced in these countries after independence became the subject of
"Postcolonial Studies," an area of academic concentration, initially
in British universities. This field gained prominence in the 1970s and has been
developing ever since. Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said's critique of
Western representations of the Eastern culture in his 1978 book, Orientalism,
is a seminal text for postcolonial studies and has spawned a host of theories
on the subject. However, as the currency of the term "postcolonial"
gained wider use, its meaning was expanded. Some consider the United States
itself a postcolonial country because of its former status as a territory of
Great Britain, but it is generally studied for its colonizing rather than its
colonized attributes
Anti Colonialism:
The political struggle of colonized peoples
against the specific ideology and practice of colonialism (see colonization).
Anti-colonialism ANTI-COLONIALISM 11 signifies the point at which the various
forms of opposition become articulated as a resistance to the operations of colonialism
in political, economic and cultural institutions. It emphasizes the need to
reject colonial power and restore local control. Paradoxically,
anti-colonialist movements often expressed themselves in the appropriation and
subversion of forms borrowed from the institutions of the colonizer and turned
back on them. Thus the struggle was often articulated in terms of a discourse
of anti-colonial ‘nationalism’ in which the form of the modern European
nation-state was taken over and employed as a sign of resistance (see
nation/nationalism).The sometimes arbitrary arrangements of colonial governance
– such as the structures of public administration and forums for local
political representation – became the spaces within which a discourse of
anti-colonial nationalism was focused and a demand for an independent
postcolonial nation-state was formed (see Anderson 1983; Chatterjee 1986,
1993). Anti-colonialism has taken many forms in different colonial situations;
it is sometimes associated with an ideology of racial liberation, as in the
case of nineteenth-century West African nationalists such as Edward Wilmot
Blyden and James African us Horton (ideologies that might be seen as the
precursors of twentieth-century movements such as negritude). Conversely, it
may accompany a demand for recognition of cultural differences on a broad and
diverse front, as in the Indian National Congress which sought to unite a
variety of ethnic groups with different religious and racial identities in a
single, national independence movement. In the second half of the twentieth
century, anti-colonialism was often articulated in terms of a radical, Marxist
discourse of liberation, and in constructions that sought to reconcile the
internationalist and anti-elitist demands of Marxism with the nationalist
sentiments of the period, in the work and theory of early national
liberationist thinkers such as C.L.R.James, Amilcar Cabral and Frantz
Fanon,(see Fanonism, national liberation).Such anti-colonial, national
liberation movements developed the Marxist idea of a revolutionary cadre to
explain the crucial role of the European (colonial) educated intelligentsia in
the anti-colonial struggle. These movements argued that the peasant/proletarian
needed to be led to a practice of liberation – through various stages of local
and national affiliation – by a bourgeois élite who would eventually, in
Cabral’s dramatic formulation, ‘commit suicide’ by developing a popular and
local social practice in which they would be assimilated.
Apartheid:
An Afrikaans term meaning ‘separation’, used
in South Africa for the policy initiated by the Nationalist Government after
1948 and usually rendered into English in the innocuous sounding phrase,
‘policy of separate development’. Apartheid had been preceded in 1913 and 1936
by the Land Acts which restricted the amount of land available to black farmers
to 13 per cent. But in 1948 the Apartheid laws were enacted, including the
Population Registration Act, which registered all people by racial group; the
Mixed Amenities Act, which codified racial segregation in public facilities;
the Group Areas Act, which segregated suburbs; the Immorality Act, which
illegalized white–black marriages; and the establishment of the so-called
Bantustans, or native homelands, to which a large proportion of the black
population was restricted. Theoretically, the establishment of the Bantustans
was supposed to provide a solution to the racial tension of South Africa by
providing a series of designated territories or homelands in which the
different races could develop separately within the state. But since the white
minority retained for themselves the bulk of the land, and virtually all of the
economically viable territory, including the agriculturally rich areas and the
areas with mining potential, it was, in practice, a means of institutionalizing
and preserving white supremacy. Since the economy required a large body of
non-white workers to live in close proximity to white areas, for which they
provided cheap labour, the Group Areas Act led to the development of specific
racially segregated townships, using low-cost housing, such as the notorious
Soweto area (South West Townships) south of Johannesburg. Under the same Act, people
of African, Cape Colored or Indian descent were forcibly removed from urban
areas where they had lived for generations. The notorious and still
unreconstructed District Six in central Capetown, bulldozed and cleared of its
mixed race inhabitants under the Act, is an often cited example of this aspect
of apartheid policy. The policy of segregation extended to every aspect of
society, with separate sections in public transport, public seats, beaches, and
many other facilities. Further segregation was maintained by the use of Pass
Laws which required non-whites to carry a pass that identified APARTHEID 14
them, and which, unless it was stamped with a work permit, restricted their
access to white areas. The term apartheid acquired very widespread resonance,
and it became commonly used outside the South African situation to designate a
variety of situations in which racial discrimination was institutionalized by
law. An extreme instance of this is when the post-structuralist philosopher and
cultural critic Jacques Derrida employed the term in an influential essay,
suggesting that it had acquired a resonance as a symbol that made it an
archetypal term of discrimination and prejudice for later twentieth-century
global culture (Derrida 1986).
Colonial Discourse:
COLONIAL DISCOURSE this is a term
brought into currency by Edward Said who saw Foucault’s notion of a discourse
as valuable for describing that system within COLONIAL DISCOURSE 36 which that
range of practices termed ‘colonial’ come into being. Said’s Orientalism, which
examined the ways in which colonial discourse operated as an instrument of
power, initiated what came to be known as colonial discourse theory, that
theory which, in the 1980s,saw colonial discourse as its field of study. The
best known colonial discourse theorist, apart from Said, is Homi Bhabha, whose
analysis posited certain disabling contradictions within colonial
relationships, such as hybridity, ambivalence and mimicry, which revealed the
inherent vulnerability of colonial discourse. Discourse, as Foucault theorizes it,
is a system of statements within which the world can be known. It is the system
by which dominant groups in society constitute the field of truth by imposing
specific knowledge’s, disciplines and values upon dominated groups. As a social
formation it works to constitute reality not only for the objects it appears to
represent but also for the subjects who form the community on which it depends.
Consequently, colonial discourse is the complex of signs and practices that
organize social existence and social reproduction within colonial
relationships. Colonial discourse is greatly implicated in ideas of the
centrality of Europe, and thus in assumptions that have become characteristic
of modernity: assumptions about history, language, literature and ‘technology’.
Colonial discourse is thus a system of statements that can be made about
colonies and colonial peoples, about colonizing powers and about the
relationship between these two. It is the system of knowledge and beliefs about
the world within which acts of colonization take place. Although it is
generated within the society and cultures of the colonizers, it becomes that
discourse within which the colonized may also come to see themselves. At the
very least, it creates a deep conflict in the consciousness of the colonized
because of its clash with other knowledge (and kinds of knowledge) about the
world.Through such distinctions it comes to represent the colonized, whatever
the nature of their social structures and cultural histories, as ‘primitive’
and the colonizers as ‘civilized’. Colonial discourse tends to exclude, of
course, statements about the exploitation of the resources of the colonized,
the political status accruing to colonizing powers, the importance to domestic
politics of the development of an empire, all of which may be compelling
reasons COLONIAL DISCOURSE 37 for maintaining colonial ties. Such is the power
of colonial discourse that individual colonizing subjects are not often
consciously aware of the duplicity of their position, for colonial discourse
constructs the colonizing subject as much as the colonized. Statements that
contradict the discourse cannot be made either without incurring punishment, or
without making the individuals who make those statements appear eccentric and
abnormal.
Commonweal Literature:
COMMONWEALTH
LITERATURE broadly, the literatures of the former British Empire and
Commonwealth, including that of Britain. In practice, however, the term has
generally been used to refer to the literatures (written in English) of colonies,
former colonies (including India) and dependencies of Britain, excluding the
literature of England.(The term has sometimes included COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE
44 literatures written in ‘local’ languages and oral performance; and it has
been used to include the literatures of Wales, Scotland and Ireland.) The rise
of the study of national literatures written in English (outside Britain)
begins with the study of ‘American ‘literature. But those literatures that came
to be collectively studied as literatures of the Commonwealth were beginning to
be considered within their own national contexts from the late 1940s onwards.
However, the concept of ‘Commonwealth Literature’ as a separate disciplinary
area within English studies began in the early 1960s in both the United States
and England. In the United States it was formulated as the study of literatures
written in a ‘world’ language in Joseph Jones Terranglia: The Case for English
as a World Literature (1965), and as Commonwealth literature in A.L. McLeod’s
The Commonwealth Pen (1961), a work dedicated to R.G. Howarth whose comparative
grounding in South African and Australian literatures had proved inspirational
for a number of early Commonwealth Literature scholars. The journal World
Literature Written in English began in 1966 and was appearing regularly by
1971; its precursor, the CBC Newsletter, was published from 1962 to 1966;a
division of the MLA (ethno-centrically entitled ‘World Literatures in English
outside the United States and Britain’) was constituted in the early 1960s. In
England the first international Commonwealth Literature Conference was held in
Leeds in 1964 and the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language
Studies formed. (The Leeds meeting followed conferences held at Makerere, Uganda,
on the role of English as an overseas language, and at Cambridge, England, on
the teaching of English literature overseas).The Journal of Commonwealth
Literature began in 1965 and the third major journal devoted exclusively to
theory and criticism of commonwealth literatures was published in 1979 (the
journal subsequently became a leading journal in establishing the shift to the
use of the term post-colonial literatures). Contemporary post-colonial studies
represent the intersection of Commonwealth literary studies and what is usually
now referred to as ‘colonial discourse theory’. Commonwealth post-colonial
critics, less engaged by Continental philosophies than colonial discourse
theorists, initially concentrated their energies on rendering creative writing
in English in Commonwealth countries visible within a discipline of literary
studies whose assumptions, bases and power were deeply and almost exclusively
invested in the literatures of England (or at best the United Kingdom). In
fighting for the recognition of post-colonial Commonwealth writing within
academies whose roots and continuing power depended on the persisting cultural
and/or political centrality of the imperium, and in a discipline whose manner
and subject matter were the focal signs and symbols of that power – British
literature and its teaching constantly reified, replayed and reinvested the
colonial relation – nationalist critics were forced to conduct their guerrilla
war within the terms and framework of an English literary critical practice. In
so doing they initially adopted the tenets of Leavisite and/or New Criticism,
reading post-colonial texts within a broadly Euro-modernist tradition, but one
whose increasing and inevitable erosion was ensured by the anti-colonial
pressures of the literary texts themselves. Diaspora:
DIASPORA From the Greek meaning ‘to disperse’
(OED).Diasporas,the voluntary or forcible movement of peoples from their
homelands into new regions, is a central historical fact of colonization.
Colonialism itself was a radically diasporic movement, involving the temporary
or permanent dispersion and settlement of millions of Europeans over the entire
world. The widespread effects of these migrations (such as that which has been
termed ecological imperialism) continue on a global scale. Many such ‘settled’ regions
were developed historically as plantations or agricultural colonies to grow
foodstuffs for the metropolitan populations, and thus a large-scale demand for
labor was created in many regions where the local population could not supply
the need. The result of this was the development, principally in the Americas,
but also in other places such as South Africa, of an economy based on slavery. Virtually
all the slaves shipped to the plantation colonies in the Americas were taken
from West Africa through the various European coastal trading enclaves. The
widespread slaving practiced by Arabs in East Africa also saw some slaves sold
into British colonies such as India and Mauritius, whilst some enslaving of
Melanesian and Polynesian peoples also occurred in parts of the South Pacific
to serve the sugarcane industry in places like Queensland, where it was known
colloquially as ‘blackbirding’. After the slave trade, and when slavery was
outlawed by the European powers in the first decades of the nineteenth century,
the demand for cheap agricultural labour in colonial plantation economies was
met by the development of a system of indentured labour. This involved
transporting, under indenture agreements, large populations of poor
agricultural labourers from population rich areas, such as India and China, to
areas where they were needed to service plantations.. The development of
diasporic cultures necessarily questions essentialist models, interrogating the
ideology of a unified, ‘nature’ cultural norm, one that underpins the
centre/margin model of colonialist discourse. In countries such as Britain and
France, the population now has substantial minorities of diasporic ex-colonial
peoples. In recent times, the notion of a ‘diasporic identity’ has been adopted
by many writers as a positive affirmation of their hybridity.
Hegemony:
Hegemony, initially a term referring to the dominance of one state
within a confederation, is now generally understood to mean domination by
consent. This broader meaning was coined and popularized in the 1930s by
Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who investigated why the ruling class was so
successful in promoting its own interests in society. Fundamentally, hegemony
is the power of the ruling class to convince other classes that their interests
are the interests of all. Domination is thus exerted not by force, nor even
necessarily by active persuasion, but by a more subtle and inclusive power over
the economy, and over state apparatuses such as education and the media,
HEGEMONY 106 by which the ruling class’s interest is presented as the common
interest and thus comes to be taken for granted. The term is useful for
describing the success of imperial power over a colonized people who may far
outnumber any occupying military force, but whose desire for self-determination
has been suppressed by a hegemonic notion of the greater good, often couched in
terms of social order, stability and advancement, all of which are defined by
the colonizing power. Hegemony is important because the capacity to influence
the thought of the colonized is by far the most sustained and potent operation
of imperial power in colonized regions. Indeed, an ‘empire’is distinct from a
collection of subject states forcibly controlled by a central power by virtue
of the effectiveness of its cultural hegemony. Consent is achieved by the
interpellation of the colonized subject by imperial discourse so that
Euro-centric values, assumptions, beliefs and attitudes are accepted as a
matter of course as the most natural or valuable. The inevitable consequence of
such interpellation is that the colonized subject understands itself as
peripheral to those Euro-centric values, while at the same time accepting their
centrality. A classic example of the operation of hegemonic control is given by
Gauri Viswanathan, who shows how ‘the humanistic functions traditionally
associated with the study of literature
Hybridity:
However, Young himself offers a
number of objections to the indiscriminate use of the term. He notes how
influential the term ‘hybridity’ was in imperial and colonial discourse in
negative accounts of the union of disparate races – accounts that implied that
unless actively and persistently cultivated, such hybrids would inevitably
revert to their ‘primitive’ stock. Hybridity thus became, particularly at the
turn of the century, part of a colonialist discourse of racism. Young draws our
attention to the dangers of employing a term so rooted in a previous set of
racist assumptions, but he also notes that there is a difference between
unconscious processes of hybrid mixture, or creolization, and a conscious and
politically motivated concern with the deliberate disruption of homogeneity. He
notes that for Bakhtin, for example, hybridity is politicized, made
contestatory, so that it embraces the subversion and challenge of division and
separation. Bakhtin’s hybridity ‘sets different points of view against each
other in a conflictual structure, which retains “a certain elemental, organic
energy and openendedness”’ (Young 1995: 21–22). It is this potential of
hybridity to reverse ‘the structures of domination in the colonial situation’
(23), which Young recognizes, that Bhabha also articulates. ‘Bakhtin’s
intentional hybrid has been transformed by Bhabha into an active moment of
challenge and resistance against a dominant colonial power . . . depriving the
imposed imperialist culture,not only of the authority that it has for so long
imposed politically, often through violence, but even of its own claims to
authenticity’ (23). Young does, however, warn of the unconscious process of
repetition involved in the contemporary use of the term. According to him, when
talking about hybridity, contemporary cultural discourse cannot escape the
connection with the racial categories of the past in which hybridity had such a
clear racial meaning. Therefore ‘deconstructing such essentialist notions of
race today we may rather be repeating the [fixation on race in the] past than
distancing ourselves from it, or providing a critique of it (27). This is a
subtle and persuasive objection to the concept. However, more positively, Young
also notes that the term indicates a broader insistence in many
twentieth-century disciplines, from physics to genetics,upon ‘a double
logic,which goes against the convention of rational either/or choices, but
which is repeated in HYBRIDITY 110 science in the split between the
incompatible coexisting logics of classical and quantum physics’ (26). In this
sense, as in much else in the structuralist and poststructuralist legacy, the
concept of hybridity emphasizes a typically twentieth-century concern with
relations within a field rather than with an analysis of discrete objects,
seeing meaning as the produce of such relations rather than as intrinsic to
specific events or objects. Whilst assertions of national culture and of
pre-colonial traditions have played an important role in creating anti-colonial
discourse and in arguing for an active decolonizing project, theories of the
hybrid nature of post-colonial culture assert a different model for resistance,
locating this in the subversive counter-discursive practices implicit in the
colonial ambivalence itself and so undermining the very basis on which
imperialist and colonialist discourse raises its claims of superiority.
Negritude:
NÉGRITUDE A theory of the
distinctiveness of African personality and culture. African Francophone writers
such as Leopold Sédar Senghor and Birago Diop, and West Indian colleagues such
as Aimé Césaire, developed the theory of négritude in Paris in the period
immediately before and after the Second World War. These African and Caribbean
intellectuals had been recruited under the French colonial policy of
assimilation to study at the metropolitan French universities.The fact that
they came from diverse colonies and that they were also exposed in Paris to
influences from African American movements such as the NÉGRITUDE 144 Harlem
Renaissance,may have influenced them in developing a general theory of negro
people that sought to extend the perception of a unified negro ‘race’to a
concept of a specifically ‘African personality’(see Black Atlantic). The
négritudinist critics drew the attention of fashionable European intellectuals
such as Jean Paul Sartre,who wrote an introduction,entitled ‘Black Orpheus’, to
the first anthology of black African writing published in France, the
Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie négre et malgache de langue française (1948).
These critics insisted that African cultures and the literatures they produced
had aesthetic and critical standards of their own, and needed to be judged in
the light of their differences and their specific concerns rather than as a
mere offspring of the parental European cultures. The establishment of the
critical magazine Présence Africaine,founded by Alioune Diop in Paris in 1947,
had initiated a new critical interest in the French language writing of Africa
and the Caribbean, and this important magazine became the vehicle for a number
of crucial critical statements over the next twenty years or so, including
Cheik Anta Diop’s influential essay ‘Nations,négres et culture’and Jacques
Stephen Aléxis ‘Of the magical realism of the Haitians’ (see magic realism).
With the decision in 1957 that future publications would be in French and
English, Présence Africaine also became an important location for critical consideration
of African writing in English (Mudimbe 1994). Négritude, and the work it
developed, took as its territory not only Africa but the whole of diasporic
African culture, since, as Senghor defined it, négritude encompassed ‘the sum
total of the values of the civilization of the African world’ (Reed and Wake
1965: 99). For this reason it was the earliest and most important movement in
establishing a wider awareness of Africa’s claim to cultural distinctiveness.
The concept of ‘négritude’ implied that all people of negro descent shared
certain inalienable essential characteristics. In this respect the movement
was, like those of earlier race-based assertions of African dignity by such
negro activists as Edward Wilmot Blyden, Alexander Crummell, W.E.B. Dubois and
Marcus Garvey, both essentialist and nativist. What made the négritude movement
distinct was its attempt to extend perceptions of the negro as possessing a
distinctive ‘personality’ into all spheres of life, intellectual, emotional and
physical.
Orientalism:
ORIENTALISM this is the term
popularized by Edward Said’s Orientalism, in which he examines the processes by
which the ‘Orient’ was, and continues to be, constructed in European thinking.
Professional Orientalists included scholars in various disciplines such as
languages, history and philology, but for Said the discourse of Orientalism was
much more widespread and endemic in European thought. As well as a form of
academic discourse it was a style of thought based on ‘the ontological and epistemological
distinction between the “Orient” and the “Occident”’ (Said 1978: 1). But, most
broadly, Said discusses Orientalism as the corporate institution for dealing
with the Orient ‘dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing
views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in
short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having
authority over the Orient’ (3). In this sense it is a classic example of
Foucault’s definition of a discourse. The significance of Orientalism is that
as a mode of knowing the other it was a supreme example of the construction of
the other, a form of authority. The Orient is not an inert fact of nature, but
a phenomenon constructed by generations of intellectuals, artists,
commentators, writers, politicians, and, more importantly, constructed by the
naturalizing of a wide range of Orientalist assumptions and stereotypes. The
relationship between the Occident and the Orient is a relationship of power, of
domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony. Consequently, Orientalist
discourse, for Said, is more valuable as a sign of the power exerted by the
West over the Orient than a ‘true’ discourse about the Orient. Under the
general heading of knowledge of the Orient, and within the umbrella of Western
hegemony over the Orient from the eighteenth century onwards, there emerged ‘a
complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum,
for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in
anthropological, biological, linguistic, racial, and historical theses about
mankind and the universe’ (7). Orientalism is not, however, a Western plot to
hold down the ‘Oriental’ world. It is: ORIENTALISM 153 a distribution of
geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical
and philological texts;it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical
distinction . . . but also of a whole series of ‘interests’ which . . . it not
only creates but maintains. It is, rather than expresses, a certain will or
intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even
incorporate, what is a manifestly different world (Said 1978: 12).
Significantly, the discourse of Orientalism persists into the present,
particularly in the West’s relationship with ‘Islam’, as is evidenced in its
study, its reporting in the media, its representation in general. But as a
discursive mode, Orientalism models a wide range of institutional constructions
of the colonial other, one example being the study, discussion and general
representation of Africa in the West since the nineteenth century. In this
sense, its practice remains pertinent to the operation of imperial power in
whatever form it adopts; to know, to name, to fix the other in discourse is to
maintain a far-reaching political control. The generalized construction of
regions by such discursive formations is also a feature of contemporary
cultural life. (See Griffiths 2003). Oddly enough, Orientalism spills over into
the realm of self construction, so that the idea of a set of generalized ‘Asian’
values (e.g. Asian democracy) is promoted by the institutions and governments
of peoples who were themselves lumped together initially by Orientalist rubrics
such as ‘the East’ (Far East, Middle East, etc.), the Orient or Asia.
Work
cited:Paper No : 10 The American literature
To evaluate my assignment please click hare.
Name: Mehta Kavita Dineshbhai
Course: M.A English
Semester: 3
Batch: 2016 – 2018
Roll No: 11
Enrollment No:2069108420170020
Submitted to: S M T S.B Gardi
Department Of English
MK Bhav University.
Email id: kavitamehta164@gmail.com
Paper No: 10: The American Literature
Topic:
The Old Man and the Sea – Tragedy
My Assignment’s
The Old Man and the Sea – Tragedy:
About the author and novel introduction
Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak park ,Illinois, in
1899 .He was the second son of Clarence Hemingway , a doctor , and Grace Hall
Hemingway , who had been an aspiring opera singer. While his father encouraged
his son’s athletic and outdoor skills, his mother fostered her son’s artistic
talents. In school, Hemingway was an active, if not outstanding, athlete. He
wrote poems and articles for the school newspaper, and he also tried his hand
at stories. After graduation Hemingway became a are porter on the Kansas city
star, where he learned the newspaper’s preferred style of simple declarative
sentences that was to permanently influence his own style of writing.
The old man and the sea won the
Pulitzer Prize in 1952.Two year later Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize For
literature. But as he approached his sixties, Hemingway’s health began
deteriorating. The once robust adventurer now suffered from hypertension, mild
diabetes, depression, and paranoia. Despite treatment for mental health issues,
Hemingway committed suicide on July 2, 1961. He is remembered as one of the
great stylistic innovators of modern American Literature. Hemingway greatness
is in his short story, which rival any other master of the form be it Joys or
Chekhov or Isaac Babel.
His works are:
·
For Whom the Bell Tolls
·
In Our Time
·
The old man and the sea
·
A Farewell to Arms
·
The Sun Also Rise
“The Old
man and the Sea” is remarkable for its stress on what men can
do on the world as an arena where heroic deeds are possible. The universe
inhabited. The universe inhabited by Santiago. The old Cuban fisherman, is not
free of tragedy and pain but these are transcended, and the affirming, is not
free of tragedy and pain but these are
transcended, and the affirming tone is in sharp contrast with the pessimism
permeating such books as The Sun Also Rises and a Farewell to Arms. Santiago
the principle figure, is a primitive Cuban, at once religious and superstious.
Yet neither his religion nor his superstitious beliefs are relevant to his
tragic experience with the great marlin, they do not create it or in any way
control its meaning. The fisherman himself, knowing what it is all about,
relies on his own resources and not on God.
The Old Man and the Sea –
Tragedy:
The Old man and the Sea by
Hemingway is a true classic in its essence. It is a complete tragedy in itself
no less than “Hamlet”.
Tragedy:
A tragedy is a tale of exception
suffering leading generally but not always to the death of the chief
protagonist of the hero. The hero is generally possessed of certain admirable
qualities but he is not perfect: in fact he suffers from a flaw or a fault
which precipitates his downfall although this downfall is brought about by some
certain other causes too the villainy of human beings, chance accident, or the
working of an arbitrary fate. The Admirable qualities or the hero must include
an exceptional capacity to suffer or the power of endurance much above that of
ordinary people. The tragic hero may perish but his spirit is not broken or
crushed. The suffering and the fate of the hero generally arouse strong feeling
of pity and fear, while the manner of enduring his suffering and his facts
arouse our admiration and respect for him. Finally a tragedy should give rise
to a moral order in the universe and not of chaos or moral lawlessness or a
dominance of the forces of disorder and darkness.
“The Old Man and the Sea” Fulfils most of these criteria of a
tragedy. Throughout the novel we see that Santiago
is showing heroic deeds. The boy Manolin
calls him the best fisherman, adding, “There are many good fishermen and some
great ones.”But there is only you. Santiago calls himself. A strange old man”,
with strength enough for a truly big fish, knowing many tricks and having ‘resolution’,
and he actually gives evidence of all these qualities afterwards. He is not an
ordinary fisherman, but a superb craftsman who knows his business thoroughly
and always practices it with great skill. He keeps his fishing lines straight
were others allow them to drift with the current. Luck is welcome nut he
believes in exactness.
On the eighty fifth day Santiago rows
far beyond the customary fishing area and he hooks a huge marlin. The account
of Santiago’s struggle with the marlin has a tragic quality because of the
suffering that Santiago undergoes, because, of the suffering of the marlin, and
because of the endurance of both the fish and the fish and the fisherman. Our
admiration and our pity are aroused both for Santiago and marlin. From the very
first Santiago shows determination. “Fish”, he says, “I will stay with you
until I am dead.” Next he says, “Fish, I love you and respect you very much.
But I will kill you dead before this ends.” His left hand becomes cramped, and
the marlin proves to be bigger than he had thought it to be. He wishes to show
to the marlin what sort of a man he is. “But I will show him what a man can do
and what a man endures.” The fish, on the other hand, in spite of the agony it
is undergoing, has proved obstinate and tough.
When at last Santiago kills the
big marlin there come the shark to eat it. Santiago has hardly enjoyed the
feeling of victory when this another series of problems befell him. But proving
a true tragic hero, he does not lose heart. He fights heroically. There he speaks
those memorable and historic words: “But man is not made for defeat. A man can
be destroyed but not defeated.” He knows he has performed another heroic act.
So we see that Santiago’s heroic quality does not forsake him till the end.
I like most tragic heroes, Santiago
experiences what is called an inner conflict. Having killed the marlin, he asks
himself whether he has committed a sin. Yes it was a sin even though he killed
the marlin to keep himself alive and feed many people. But everything is a sin.
“Do not think about sin”, He tells himself, and yet keeps thinking about sin.
We find out that Santiago is
perfectly conscious of the transgression, which has brought a disaster for him.
He realized that he went too far out, that he went “beyond all people in the
world.” Hemingway seems to be saying that man, in his individualism, his pride,
and his need, inevitably goes beyond his true place in the world and thereby
brings violence and destruction on himself and others. “I am sorry that I went
too far out, I ruined us both,” says Santiago to the mutilated marlin.“You
violated you luck when went too far outside”, he says to himself. Finally, when
he asks himself: “What beat you?” the answer is:”Nothing .I went out too far.”
Going ‘too far’ for fishing was
his mis-calculation. What led him too far was his ‘pride’. He aspired to catch
big fish. His pride in his strength, aspiration to catch big fish and going
‘too far’ proved to be his ‘hubris’ – the tragic flaw. He has shown several
qualities of tragic heroes. Like Hamlet, he thinks ‘ a lot and tried to keep
his mind ‘clear’ ,like Macbeth, he has ambition ,like King Lear, his
calculations goes wrong ,like Brutus, he stabs his ‘friend’ and ‘brother’,.The
old man is the perfect embodiment of tragic hero.
It has unties of time, place and
action also. So “The Old Man and the Sea” is a remarkable tale of courage,
endurance, pride, humanity, and death. It is classical not only technically, in
its narrow confines, the purity of its design, that like a unities of time,
place and action, and even in the fatal flaw of exceeding one’s limits and
going too far out. It is also classical
in spirit, in its nature acceptance of things as they are. It is much in the
spirit of the Greek tragedies in which men fight against great odds and win
moral victories. It is especially like Greek tragedy in that, as the hero fails
and falls, we get an unforgettable glimpse of what stature a man achieve.
Thus, Old Man and the sea is a
moving parable about the apotheosis of human soul, about humanity’s struggle to
survive in a hostile world, its passion to show grace under pressure.
Conclusion:
Through perfectly realized symbolism
and irony, then, Hemingway has beautifully and movingly spun out of an old
fisherman’s great trial just such a pragmatic ethic and its basis in an
essentially tragic of old man, and in this reaffirmation of man’s most
cherished values and their reaffirmation in the terms of our time rests the
deepest and the enduring significance of “The Old Man and the Sea”.
Work cited:
http://www.bookrags.com/essay-2006/7/17/6120/36794/#gsc.tab=0
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