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  • Reflexive novel: Definition, Meaning and Examples

    Reflexive novel: Definition, Meaning and Examples

    The reflexive novel is a novel in which the author calls the reader’s attention to the fact that he or she is writing (or has written) a novel. Thus, what Roland Barthes would call a ‘writerly’ novel.

    A classic and early example of such a work is Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy(1760–67), an attempt at autobiography in which virtually no progress is made. Sterne uses many devices to show a discrepancy between reality/life and art, and that it is impossible to provide a coherent and rational picture of anything as complex as life and reality.

    Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749) are other reflexive novels of that period. In the 19th c., most novelists tried to give form, shape, and rationality to their versions of reality. However, this often tended to falsify reality in the cause of artistic and aesthetic coherence. Periodically, novelists were aware of the inherent shortcomings of the endeavour to impose form on the disorderly or chaotic.

    In the 20th century, numerous novelists developed various forms of reflexive novels. James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is an outstanding example. So is Andre Gide’s Les Faux-monnayeurs (1926). Since the 1950s, we should also mention the work of Vladimir Nabokov, Flann O’Brien, William Burroughs, Christine Brooke-Rose, Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Thomas Pynchon, and John Fowles. This fiction is sometimes called ‘self-conscious’ or ‘self-referential’.

    Also read: What is Touchstone Method?

     

  • Discuss Tennyson’s Tithonus as an instance of the dramatic monologue

    Discuss Tennyson’s Tithonus as an instance of the dramatic monologue

    Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem Tithonus is a monologue of the single character of the poem, Tithonus. The mythological Trojan lover of the goddess of Dawn, Aurora, is found to speak here of his frustration and desperation even after enjoying the boon of immortality. The speaker here is one. He speaks of himself, with a part of his address meant for his beloved goddess, Aurora.

    There is not the least doubt that the poem is a monologue. But how far can it be taken as a dramatic monologue, as designated in some quarters? A dramatic monologue is a poetic piece in the first person. In it, a character-a man or a woman-is placed in a dramatic situation and made to give out his or her thought or feeling, under the incitement of that very situation. He or she is found to express his or her thoughts, feelings, and experiences in that very situation, stirring him or her remarkably.

    The essence of the dramatic monologue lies in the situation in which the sole character is placed and speaks out in a tense situation. As contended by Walter Pater, this is pre-eminent in the poetry of situation.

    Tennyson’s poem is a monologue, like his other poem, Ulysses. But how far is this a dramatic monologue? The poem has no tense situation, like Browning’s celebrated dramatic monologues—The Last Ride Together, Porphyria’s Lover, and The Laboratory. The speaker here states, in the manner of Tennyson’s other Greek hero, Ulysses, of the existing state of his life. He enjoys eternal life, but with the yoke of age, infirmity, and ailment pressing him down and making him miserably helpless. He feels exhausted, haunted by the hard truth of an eternal existence without youth, health, or beauty. Like ‘a white hair’d shadow’, he roams in utter desolation and wretchedness.

    This situation is, however, not essentially dramatic. It is an existing state, not a suddenly developed one, as in The Last Ride Together or Porphyria’s Lover. The poem is not exactly a proper dramatic monologue in the light of Walter Pater’s appraisement of this kind of poetry.

    Of course, the poem has a situation and a revelation of the speaker’s character. His monologue brings out the state of his mind-his sense of profound sorrow and desperation. He no longer aspires for the gift of immortality that he once sought so earnestly from his beloved Aurora. Frustration sips deep into his heart, and the much sought-after old bliss is all turned into a terrible curse to him. Death, and not eternal life, is his choice now and leads him to his pathetic exhortation to his loving goddess :

    Tennyson’s poem is a monologue, like his other poem, Ulysses. But how far is this a dramatic monologue? The poem has no tense situation, like Browning’s celebrated dramatic monologues—The Last Ride Together, Porphyria’s Lover, and The Laboratory. The speaker here states, in the manner of Tennyson’s other Greek hero, Ulysses, of the existing state of his life. He enjoys eternal life, but with the yoke of age, infirmity, and ailment pressing him down and making him miserably helpless. He feels exhausted, haunted by the hard truth of an eternal existence without youth, health, or beauty. Like ‘a white hair’d shadow’, he roams in utter desolation and wretchedness.

    This situation is, however, not essentially dramatic. It is an existing state, not a suddenly developed one, as in The Last Ride Together or Porphyria’s Lover. The poem is not exactly a proper dramatic monologue in the light of Walter Pater’s appraisement of this kind of poetry.

    Of course, the poem has a situation and a revelation of the speaker’s character. His monologue reveals the state of his mind- his profound sorrow and desperation. He no longer aspires for the gift of immortality that he once sought so earnestly from his beloved Aurora. Frustration sips deep into his heart, and the much sought-after old bliss is all turned into a terrible curse to him. Death, and not eternal life, is his choice now and leads him to his pathetic exhortation to his loving goddess :

    Release me and restore me to the ground
    Thou seest all things, thou wilt see my grave.

    Tennyson’s poem is a monologue, as Tithonius speaks out of his acute agony and restlessness, though favoured with his beloved goddess’s rare blessing of immortality. However, the dramatic aspect of his situation is not sufficiently suggestive to reckon it as a perfect instance of the dramatic monologue.

  • Discuss about Parnassus Plays

    Discuss about Parnassus Plays

    Parnassus Plays is the name given to a group of three satiric comedies produced between 1598 and 1602 by St John’s College, Cambridge students. It consists of The Pilgrimage to Parnassus, The Return from Parnassus, and The Return from Parnassus Or the Scourage of Simony. The second and third plays are sometimes called Part One and Part Two of The Return from Parnassus. Authorship has not been established, but they seem to be the work of two dramatists, unusually writing academic drama in English rather than Latin (or even Greek), as was more common. They have been attributed to John Day and, more recently, John Weever of Queen’s and Joseph Hall.

    Parnassus Plays aim to set forth the wretched state of scholars and the small respect paid to learning by the world. The first play, The Pilgrimage to Parnassus, describes the progress of the two students, Philomusus and Studioso, through the university courses of logic, rhetoric, etc., and the temptations that are set before them by their meeting with Madido, a drunkard; Stupido, a puritan who hates learning; Amoretto, a lover; and Ingenioso, a disappointed student. The Return from Parnassus deals with the struggles of the two students after the completion of their studies at the university. It shows them discovering by the bitter experience of how little pecuniary value their learning is.  In the second play, Gullio, a fool, quotes from Venus and Adonis and Romeo and Juliet and exclaims, ‘O sweet Master Shakespeare! I’ll have his picture in my study at the court.’ The play contains the earliest known parody of Shakespearian verse, written in the rhyme-royal stanza form of Lucrece. They are full of allusions to contemporary literature and drama. In the third, more satirical, section Richard Burbage and Will Kemp audition recent students for places in their company, using Richard III’s opening soliloquy as a test piece, and the students are shown on their way to London, learning how to catch a patron or cheat a tradesman, and following menial occupations. Eventually, discouraged, they return to Cambridge. The plays were first published in 1886 and edited by J. B. Leishman (1949).

    Also read: Discuss the term Ideology: Definition, Meaning and Its Significance

  • A short note on Anecdote: Definition and Examples

    A short note on Anecdote: Definition and Examples

    Definition and Meaning:
    An anecdote is a brief account of or a story about an individual or an incident. The anecdotal digression is a common feature of narrative in prose and verse. In the history of English literature and of literary characters, the anecdote has a specific importance.

    In his Dictionary, Johnson defined the term as ‘something yet unpublished; secret history’. During the 18th century, interest in secret histories increased steadily, and there is no doubt that there was some connection between this and the growing popularity of anecdotage, table-talk, and biography at that time. During the second half of the 18th c., there was almost a ‘craze’ for ‘secret’ histories. Over a hundred anecdote books have been published in England in the last thirty years.

    Examples:

    Isaac Disraeli, father of Benjamin, became one of the best-known and most assiduous gleaners of anecdotes. In 1791, he published three volumes titled Curiousities of Literature: Anecdotes, Characters, Sketches, Observations, Literary, Historical, and Critical. These he followed with other collections: Calamities of Authors (1812–13) in two volumes, and Quarrels of Authors (1814) in three volumes. In 1812 John Nichols published the first of nine volumes in a series titled Literary Anecdotes of the 18th c. Such works remained popular during the Victorian period. In 1975, there was The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes.

    Also read: What is Parody: Definition, characteristics and examples

  • Discuss about the Rise of Satire in English Literature and famous writers of Satire

    Discuss about the Rise of Satire in English Literature and famous writers of Satire

    Definition and Meaning of Satire:

    Satire, in general, means a literary composition, in verse or prose, to expose the vices or follies of some person or persons, to ridicule or banter them. But strictly speaking, satire is a poem, aiming to expose the prevalent vices or follies of a society or a section of society. The objective of satire is critical, but as noted by John Dryden, a good satire has clinical and corrective effects, too. In his language, “The true end of satire is the amendment of vices by correction. And he who writes honestly is no more an enemy to the offender than the physician to the patient when he prescribes harsh remedies to an inveterate disease.”

    However, the inclusion of satire only in the poetic composition is no longer acceptable. Today, there are more forceful prose satires than poetical ones. Hence, the range of satire cannot be kept confined now to poetry alone. Satire may, thus, be described as a literary form which is designed to incite contempt, fun, or disgust at what is ridiculous or unseemly. The word has come from the Latin term ‘satura’, which initially meant a medley or miscellany. In its earliest form, satire probably meant a farce or parody.

    Origin of Satire:

    The origin of satire is, however, found in the history of Roman literature. It has been claimed that the only literary form, invented by the Romans, is satire. This contention, however, is not very accurate. There is a clear indication that early Greek writers indulged in the composition of satire. There is sufficient evidence in early Greek literature to show how the Greek masters used invectives to correct and improve general and public morals. Satire is not absent even in the early Greek drama and Greek comedy. A delicate blending of satire and poetry characterises the mighty works of Aristophanes, perhaps the greatest name in classical Greek Comedy.

    Roman Contributions to Satire:

    But satire, as a particular form of literature and a potent influence on later European writers, is mainly a creation of the Latin masters. As a characteristic poetic form, the inventor of satire was Caius Lucilius. He was followed by a more brilliant figure, Horace. Horace wrote several realistic, humorous, and satirical poems, in which he investigated and castigated social abuses. Horace’s satire, however, is not merely personal. It bears a particular note of universality and philosophy. Next to Horace comes the name of Persius, who has displayed both philosophical outlook and literary originality in his satirical works. But, perhaps, the greatest Roman satirist is Juvenal. His originality lies particularly in his introduction of a rhetorical strength and a tragic grandeur into verse satires.

    Satire in the 18th Century: Swift and Pope:

    In the first half of the 18th c., there flourished the two greatest satirists in the history of literature; namely, Swift and Pope. Swift excelled in prose, Pope in verse. The Dean’s principal works were A Tale of a Tub (1704), The Battle of the Books (1704), Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and A Modest Proposal (1729). He was also an accomplished verse satirist, as he showed, for example, in Verses on the Death of Dr Swift (1739). Pope’s main works were The Rape of the Lock (1714), miscellaneous Satires, Epistles and Moral Essays published during the 1730s and The Dunciad (1728, 1729, 1742 and 1743). Other notable instances of satire in English literature from the mid-18th c. onwards were Fielding’s burlesque play Tom Thumb (1730) – burlesque was a particularly favoured means of satire at this time – his Shamela (1741) and his Jonathan Wild (1743). To these examples, one should add Johnson’s great poems, London (1738) and The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), Charles Churchill’s Rosciad (1761) and The Prophecy of Famine (1763) and other works, and the anonymous Letters of Junius (1769-71). In France, the greatest prose satirist of the period was unquestionably Voltaire. Minor verse satirists of the later 18th c. were John Wolcot, Christopher Anstey, Allan Ramsay and Robert Burns.

    Satire in the Romantic Period:

    Most major poets who flourished at the turn of the century and during the Romantic period wrote satire occasionally. Crabbe, for instance, in his narrative poem The Borough (1810), critically portrays the moral weaknesses, pretensions, and injustices of English village life.; Shelley in Masque of Anarchy (1832) uses satire to expose the cruelty and corruption of the British government; Keats in his unfinished The Cap and Bells (1848) pokes fun at pompous aristocrats. However, the major satirist of this period was undoubtedly Byron, who was outstandingly successful in the satiric mode in Don Juan (1819–24), mocks society’s hypocrisy, political corruption, romantic ideals, and even literary conventions. And in  The Vision of Judgment (1822), Byron satirises the poet laureate Robert Southey and his political shift from radical to conservative. Byron uses biting wit to criticise Southey’s self-righteousness and the broader societal moral decay.

    Also read: What is Parody: Definition, characteristics and examples

  • What is Parody: Definition, characteristics and examples

    What is Parody: Definition, characteristics and examples

    Parody (Gk meaning ‘beside, subsidiary or mock song’) is the imitative use of an author’s words, style, attitude, tone, and ideas to make them ridiculous. This is usually achieved by exaggerating certain traits, using more or less the same technique as the cartoon caricaturist. It is a kind of satirical mimicry. As a branch of satire, its purpose may be corrective and derisive.

    The origins of parody are ancient. Aristotle refers to it in his Poetics and attributes its invention to Hegemon of Thasos, who used an epic style to represent men as inferior to what they are in real life. Hegemon was supposed to have been the first man to introduce parody in the theatre, in the 5th century. BC. However, the 6th-century poet Hipponax has also been credited with this. Aristophanes used parody in the Frogs, where he removed Aeschylus and Euripides’s style. Plato also caricatured the style of various writers in the Symposium. Lucian used parody in his Dialogues. In the Middle Ages, parodies of the liturgy, hymns, and the Bible were frequent. One of the first and best-known English parodies was Geoffrey Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas (c. 1383), a skit on some of the more absurd characteristics of medieval romances (Chaucer was, in turn, to be well parodied by Alexander Pope and W. W. Skeat).

    Late in the Renaissance, Cervantes parodied the tradition of medieval romances in Don Quixote (1605, 1615). Erasmus in Moriae Encomium (1509) and Rabelais in Gargantua and Pantagruel (1534, 1532) turned scholasticism upside down. Shakespeare parodied the euphuism of John Lyly in Henry IV, Pt I (1597), Marlowe’s bombastic manner in Hamlet (c. 1603), and the general style of Thomas Nashe in Love’s Labour’s Lost (c. 1595). Later, Sir John Suckling took off Donne splendidly as a love poet, and in 1701, John Philips parodied Milton very cleverly in The Splendid Shilling. In 1736, Isaac Hawkins’s A Pipe of Tobacco created a precedent because it was the first collection of parodies of various authors’ supposed attempts on a single subject. Henry Fielding’s Shamela (1741) was a complete parodic novel at the expense of Richardson’s Pamela (1740). R.B.Sheridan’s The Critic (1779), was a successful parody of sentimental drama and the malicious literary criticism of the period.

    The Romantic period and the 19th c. provided ample targets for literary iconoclasts. In 1812, James and Horace Smith published Rejected Addresses, in which Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Dr. Johnson, and others were parodied very successfully. Thereafter, Burns, Byron, Wordsworth, Poe, Longfellow, Tennyson, Browning, William Morris, the Rossettis, Swinburne, Southey, Whitman, Hopkins, and Kipling were quite frequently parodied, often by writers equally distinguished. For example, Keats on Wordsworth, Byron on Wordsworth, James Hogg on Wordsworth, Swinburne on Tennyson, C. S. Calverley on Browning, Lewis Carroll on Swinburne, Hogg on Coleridge – and so forth. The favourite victims were Southey, Wordsworth, Browning and Swinburne.

    Max Beerbohm refined parody to art, and his collection of his parodies in A Christmas Garland (1912), which includes pieces in the manner of Kipling, Galsworthy, Hardy, Arnold Bennett, Edmund Gosse and others, is generally agreed to have set a standard which may never be surpassed. James Joyce was a gifted parodist, some of whose best efforts can be found in the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode of Ulysses. A classic parody of the 1930s was Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm(1932), a clever caricature of the primitivism of Mary Webb’s novels – and also, for that matter, of the primitivism of Thomas Hardy, J. C. Powys and D. H. Lawrence. More recent instances are C. Day Lewis’s parodies in Part V of An Italian Visit, Cyril Connolly on Aldous Huxley, Paul Jennings on Resistentialism, Kenneth Tynan on Thornton Wilder – plus a whole school of American parodists, much of whose work has appeared in The New Yorker. The best known are Robert Benchley, Peter De Vries, Wolcott Gibbs, S. J. Perelman, Frank Sullivan, James Thurber, and E. B. White.

    Also read: Discuss the term Ideology: Definition, Meaning and Its Significance.

  • Sarah Fielding (1710-1768); Biography and famous works

    Sarah Fielding (1710-1768); Biography and famous works

    Sarah Fielding (8 November 1710 – 9 April 1768) was an English novelist and sister of the famous novelist Henry Fielding. She was born in Dorset and educated in Salisbury. For much of her life, she lived quietly in and around London, where she became part of Samuel Richardson’s circle, and later near Bath.

    She contributed small items to Henry’s work before publishing her own works. In 1742, Henry Fielding published Joseph Andrews, and Sarah Fielding is often credited with having written the letter from Leonora to Horatio (two of the characters in the book). In 1743, Henry Fielding published his Miscellanies (containing his life of Jonathan Wild), and his sister may have written its narrative of the life of Anne Boleyn.

    In 1744, she published anonymously her own best-known novel, The Adventures of David Simple, a psychologically focused ‘Moral Romance’, with (in its second edition) a preface by her brother. Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple followed in 1747, and in 1753 the somber Volume the Last. Her The Governess or The Little Female Academy (1749) was the first English school story written for children. She was almost certainly the author of Remarks on Clarissa (1749).

    With Jane Collier, she published The Cry (1754), an unusual dialogue between Portia (the Solo) representing integrity, and an audience (the Chorus) representing ignorant malice. The parallel of author against critic is implied throughout. The heavily researched The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia (1757) presents a series of dramatic monologues in which the subtle self-seeking of Cleopatra is contrasted with the honesty of Octavia. The History of the Countess of Dellwyn (1759) traces the disastrous relationship of an old husband and a young wife, and includes some thoughts on literary mimesis. The light-hearted epistolary novel History of Ophelia (1760) relates the adventures of an ingenuous young woman constantly astonished by the unquestioned conventions of society. A successful translation of Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates, with the Defence of Socrates before his Judges appeared in 1762.

    Also read: William Sydney Graham (1918-1986) Scottish poet and his poetry collections

  • William Sydney Graham (1918-1986) Scottish poet and his poetry collections

    William Sydney Graham (1918-1986) Scottish poet and his poetry collections

    William Sydney Graham (1918-1986) was a neo-romantic Scottish poet. He was born and brought up in Greenock. He studied structural engineering at Stow College, Glasgow, before winning a bursary to pursue a literature course at Newbattle Abbey, then a newly founded college for adult education, in 1938. After a long nomadic period in Ireland, and Scotland, in 1948 Graham moved to London where he adopted a Bohemian lifestyle. His friends included the playwright Harold Pinter and poets Dylan Thomas, George Barker, and T.S. Eliot. The affinities between these three poets derive from a common interest in poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins, Arthur Rimbaud, and Hart Crane,

    The poems in Cage without Grievance (1942), Seven Journeys (1944), and 2ND Poems (1945-the title is a punning dedication to his wife Nessie Dunsmuir) are often said to resemble those of Dylan Thomas, though they lack the acoustic force and syntactical discipline of the Welsh poet’s work. The White Threshold (1949), a breakthrough volume, makes use of marine images drawn from Graham’s youth on the Clyde estuary and includes the serene, verbally playful meditation ‘Listen. Put on Morning. The long title poem of The Night-Fishing (1955) resourcefully deploys the metaphor of a herring fishing expedition to explore the poet’s struggle with language and vocation. Malcolm Mooney’s Land (1970) and Implements in their Places (1977) bring a new lucidity and inventiveness to Graham’s characteristic preoccupation with solipsism, community, and communication. Perhaps because of this alleviation of his financial circumstances, Graham began to publish with more frequency, with Implements in their Places (1977), Collected Poems 1942–1977 (1979), and an American-published Selected Poems (1980). Several collections of his work were published after his death, including ‘New Collected Poems’ (2004).

  • A short note on the periodical Tel Quel by Phillipe Sollers

    A short note on the periodical Tel Quel by Phillipe Sollers

    In 1960 the French novelist and critic Phillipe Sollers (1936-) founded the literary periodical Tel Quel, and later he outlined its objectives in his discourse Logiques (1968). The aims are basically ideological and activist, as well as aesthetic. One of its aims is to restore to language its original revolutionary power, and it advances the principle that ‘literature is language made with language’.

    Tel Quel school, which has been influenced by, among others, Roland Barthes, and also by theories of semiotics and semiology, has been particularly concerned to promote interest in and more understanding of such French writers as the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98), Lautréamont (1846-70) and Antonin Artaud (1896 1948), who had a considerable influence on theatre and drama in the 20th c.

    Also read: A short note on Prague Linguistic Circle

  • Discuss the term Ideology: Definition, Meaning and Its Significance

    Discuss the term Ideology: Definition, Meaning and Its Significance

    The term ‘Ideology’ was coined by the French philosopher Antoine Destutt de Tracy, who conceived it in 1796 as the “science of ideas” to develop a rational system of ideas to oppose the irrational impulses of the mob. Ideology is a set of beliefs, convictions, or ideas that both bind a particular group of people together and determine the actions they take. For this reason, ideology is often used-particularly in the media, as a pejorative, as though to say only certain types of people have (indeed ‘suffer from’) ideology and it renders them incapable of thinking for themselves. But, as commentators like Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek argue, this position is itself ideological because it is built on the tacit, but obviously, deeply held belief that its position, i.e., the allegedly non-ideological position, is the ‘normal’ or ‘commonsense’ view of things. In contrast, the so-called ideological position is aberrant. The notion of a non-ideological position is thus a myth or, better yet, a projection. This, in turn, points to two other characteristics of ideology: it is frequently invisible to its adherents, and it serves to create rules or regimes of inclusion and exclusion.
    Because of its invisibility, ideology is often equated with ‘false consciousness.’ To escape his censors, the imprisoned Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci used the term ‘hegemony’ in place of ideology and, in doing so, explained the invisibility of ideology- it is, he argued, the role of ideology to define and police that which counts as commonsense, that which everybody knows to be so, and insofar as it does that it is invisible. The task of any politics, then, according to Gramsci, is to overturn this state of affairs, but not so as to get rid of ideology altogether- impossible, in any case- but rather to make way for a new ideology, one which is clear about interests.
    Marxists generally refer to this formation of ideology as class consciousness. Perhaps the most widely used definition of ideology is the one given by French Marxist Louis Althusser, who conceived it as an imaginary relation to real conditions.

    Also read: What is Touchstone Method?