Dynamics of Human Relationship in Tara

Name :- Rathod Zindagi V.

Roll : 13

Part :- I Sem. II

Paper:- E-C-202: Indian Writing in English – Post Independance

Topic:-   Dynamics of Human Relationship in Tara

Submitted To,  Dr. Dilip Barad

                         Dept. of English

                          Bhavnagar University

                           Bhavnagar

Topic :- Dynamics of Human Relationship in Tara

                    Mahesh Dattani freauently takes  as his subject the complicared dynamics of the modern urban family. His characters struggle for some kind of freedom and happiness under the weight of tradition. Culture construction of gender, and repressed  desire. In his plays, Dattani takes on what he calls ‘Invisible issues’of  Indian society. Dattani challenges  the  constructions of ‘Indian ‘ and ‘indian’ as they have traditionally been defined in modern theater.

                    Tara cenres on the emotional separation that grows betreen two conjoined twins following the discovey that their physical separation was manipulated by their mother and grandfather to fovour the boy over the girl. Tara , a fiesty girl who isn’t given the opportunities given to her brother. Dattani sees Tara as a play about coming the gendered self, about coming to terms with the feminine side of oneself in a world that always favors what is ‘male’ many people in India see it as a play about the girl child . it is important to note that all of Dattani’s writes plays to be seen and heard,literature to be read.

                    Tara is throughout a tragic play and its difficult to point out only few points for its tragedy, but even then I would say that besides Tara and chandan’s physical and mental sound, Bharati is more tragic in comparison to Tara and chandan. Tara is a story of girl who  wants  to twinkle and shine, just like her name. Dattani using the themes like gender  identity,discrimination,middle class life,revelation etc. He through these themes has beautifuliy shown the agony of a girl in typical Indian society.

                  These are stereotypical gender roles and Dattani makes is when Tara explains to Roopa about the conversation between Father and son,

“ The men in the house were

Deciding on whether they

Were going to go hunting

While the women looked

After the cave.’’

                                        Dattani very cleverly the light to highlight the action wherever he wants at any level without any breaks for chance of scene. It is this the gives the play the feeling of unity of action music is so well  used that it also creates and enhance the mood of character Issues of gender discrimination ‘Tara is a riveting play that question the role of society that treats the children of the same womb in two different ways.Dattani’s  ‘Tara’is a poignant play about a boy and girl who are joined together at the hip and have to be separated surgically.The fact that it is  women who continues the chain of injustice. Tara is not just the story of protagonist of the play ‘Tara’, but it is the story of even girl child born in ‘Indian’family whether urban or rural.

                                              It is a bitter example of child abuse present in the Indian societies. Every girl child born an Indian family does suffer some kind of explotation propounded to the son.the play revolves around the simese twins,chandan and Tara patel, throughtout the play we can feel that she beares some kind of aversion with outside world and her world consists of only her parents and her brother whom she was ever close to the play explores besides exposing the typical Indian mind set which has from time immemorial preferred a boy child and to a girl child.

                 It looks at the triumphs and the failures of an Indian mind set which has from time immemorial preferred and the failures of an Indian family. Shashi Deshpande communicates  ‘Roots and Shadows.’

“women’s  lives, they have told me,

Contained no choice the women had

No choice but to submit and accept

I had often wondered…they have been

Born with out wiils, or have their wills atrophied

Through a life time of disuse.’

                                  Tara , a feisty  girl who isn’t given to her opportunities as were given to her brother eventually wastes away and dies. His plays deal with cotemporary issues. They are plays of today sometimes as actual as to cause-times as actual as to cause controversy,but at the same time they are plays which embody many of the classic concerns of world drama.thus, to conclude Everyone in the play is trying to prove his or her superiority.   

MULTIPLICITY OF THEMES IN MIDDLEMARCH

Name :- Rathod Zindagi V.

Roll : 13

Part :- I Sem. II

Paper:- E-C -204: The Victorian Literature

Topic:-   MULTIPLICITY OF THEMES IN MIDDLEMARCH 

Submitted To,  Dr. Dilip Barad

                         Dept. of English

                          Bhavnagar University

                           Bhavnagar

 THE MAJOR THEME

Middlemarch is a complex work of art and a number of themes and ideas are woven into its complex fabric. One of its major themes, however, is the frustration of noble ideals and lofty aspirations by meanness of opportunity. In Middlemarch the theme has been studied with reference to a number of characters. And has been universalized in this way.

Middlemarch subtitle is “a study of provincial life”, this means that Middlemarch. Represents the spirit of nineteenth-century England through the unknown, historically unremarkable common people. The small community of Middlemarch is thrown into relief against the background of larger social transformations, rather than the other way around.

Middlemarch is a major novel by any standard. The historical canvas is very wide. The several storylines storylines of the multiple plot are traced from their beginning, gradually  combining into a drama which gathers intense human and moral interest. Themes emerge naturally out of believable families and marriages, and final outcomes do not depend upon gratuitous interventions from melodrama or authorial providence. Middlemarch: a study of provincial life is set, like Felix Holt, in a midlands manufacturing town towards 1832.

* DOROTHEA – CASAUBON STORY

Dorothea is the first major character in the novel whose life is a tragedy of frustrated idealism. She has been referred to as a modern st.theresa motivated by an intense desire to do good and make some noble achievement. But Middlemarch society, narrow, stinted and tradition bound, offers little opportunity for the realization of her lofty ideals and noble aspirations. She  seeks to find an outlet for the re-building of the cottages of the poor tenants on the state of a neighboring  baronet and friend of the family. Sir chettam. But the scope for such philanthropy is extremely limited and it bring little satisfaction to this later day Theresa. Thus her lofty aspirations are frustrated by her meanness of opportunity.

*   LYDGATE – ROSAMOND STORY

This  very frustration of noble aspirations by “meanness of opportunity” and “sport of commonness” is also illustrated by lydgate – rosamond  story. Well educated and cultured, lydgate  is an exceptional individual who is keen to promote the cause of medical science by devoting his energies to higher research and study, and not waste  them in earning money like the common fashionable physician. He comes to Middlemarch hoping that in the seclusion of this provincial town be would he able fully to realize his aspirations. But, says Joan Bennett, “lydgate’s promise the promise of a man of exceptional moral and intellectual gifts, was unfulfilled partly because of the obstructive stupidity of the people among whom he worked and the various crosscurrents of religious and political prejudice, professional jealousy and economic difficulty which can impede the progress of medical science. But unfulfillment was to be partly also the result, both of positive and negative qualities in his own character”.

Most character in Middlemarch marry for love rather than obligation, yet marriage still appears negative and unromantic. Marriage and the pursuit of It are central concerns in Middlemarch, but unlike in many novels of the, marriage is not considered the ultimate source of happiness. Two examples are the failed marriages of Dorothea and lydgate. Dorothea marriage fails because of her youth and of her disillusions about marrying a much older man, while lydgate’s marriage fails because of irreconcilable  personalities. Mr. and Mrs. Bulstrode also face a marital crisis due to his inability to tell her about the past, and Fred vincy and Mary Garth also face a great deal of hardship in making their union. As none of the marriages reach a perfect fairytale ending, Middlemarch offers a clear critique of the usual portrayal of marriage as romantic and unproblematic. 

The whole above question depends upon the characters and due to their actions which kind of incidents are taken place in the novel.  The texture of “Middlemarch “ is a very complex one, because it is made up of a number of stories. And each story the author George Eliot has narrated one problem of the English society and of an individual of her time. First there is Dorothea – Casaubon  - ladislaw love triangle, secondly, there is the tale of romance and marriage of lydgate and rosamond. Thirdly story of Fred vincy and Mary Garth. There is also the bulstrode – theme of a murky, discreditable past catching up with the present. Finally there is the story of wealth and avarice connected with the life and death of peter Featherstone. Thus due to such complex plot, Henry James averes.

“A treasure house of detail but an indifferent whole”.

But the novelist has shown great skill in welding this heterogeneous material into a single whole. So that “unity amidst immense variety” characterizes the novel.

This character play significant role. They are not limited to their stories. But they plays their role into other story also for instance ladislaw and lydgate become friends and Dorothea becomes the medical man’s patroness. Further. The various characters and stories are well- integrated with their social environment. For instance, in the provincial Middlemarch  society, birth, class and rank are a powerful determining force. They are shocon as being impediments to the marriage of Dorothea and ladislaw but they act as a magnet to bring about the union of rosamond and lydgate. Another and

Even more important factor is money. It is the cause of lydgate’s entanglement and downfall. Balstrode and his wealth find a parallel in Featherstone. Money is much cause for Garth and for other also. In all these ways. The novelist has closely integrated individual characters and actions with their social medium and has given us a novel which an organic whole. Thus w.j.harvey averses.

“The taproot of her vision, that which howrishes the whole fabric is her concern with what we may call the transeendence of self.”

The typical psychological and spiritual development of her protagonist is the painful struggle to break free from the prison of egoism into a life of sympathy with their fellow men. There are subtle variations of this theme, but the most subtle being the case of Dorothea.

Type of Cultural studies:-British cultural materialism and Post colonial studies

Name :- Rathod Zindagi V.

Roll : 13

Part :- I Sem. II

Paper:- E-E -205: Cultural Studies

Topic:-   Type of Cultural studies:-British cultural materialism and Post colonial studies.

Submitted To,  Dr. Dilip Barad

                         Dept. of English

                          Bhavnagar University

                           Bhavnagar

Type of Cultural studies:-British cultural materialism and Post colonial studies.

Postcolonial Studies.

The critical analysis of the history, culture, literature,

And modes of discourse that are specific to the former colonies of England, Spain, France, and other European imperial powers. These studies have focused especially on the Third World countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean Islands and South America. Postcolonial studies sometimes encompass Also aspects of British literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth Centuries, viewed through a perspective that reveals the extent to which the Social and economic life represented in the literature was tacitly underwritten  By colonial exploitation. Some scholars, however, extend the scope of such Analyses also to the discourse and cultural productions of such countries as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, which achieved independence much Earlier than the Third World countries.

                               An important text in establishing the theory and practice in this recently Developed field of study wasOrientalism (1978) by the Palestinian-American Scholar Edward Said, which applied a revised form of Michel Foucault's historicist Critique of discourse (see undernew historicism) to analyze what he Called "cultural imperialism." This mode of imperialism imposed its power not by force, but by the effective means of disseminating in subjugated Colonies a Eurocentricdiscourse that assumed the normality and preeminence Of everything "occidental," correlatively with its representations of the "oriental “As an exotic and inferior other. Since the 1980s, such analysis has been supplemented by other theoretical principles and procedures, including Althusser'sRedefinition of the Marxist theory of ideology and the deconstructive Theory of Derrida. The rapidly expanding field of postcolonial studies, as a result, is not a unified movement with a distinctive methodology? One can, However, identify several central and recurrent issues :( 1) the rejection of the master-narrative of Western imperialism—in which the colonial other is not only subordinated and marginalized,

                           But in effect deleted as a cultural agency—and its replacement by counter-narrative in which the colonial cultures fight their way back into a world history written by Europeans. The influential collection of Essays, the Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989), ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin’s, stresses what it terms the hybridization of colonial languages and cultures, in which imperialist importations are superimposed on indigenous traditions? It also includes a number of postcolonial counter texts to the

colonial history.(2) An abiding concern with the formation, within Western discursivePractices, of the colonial and postcolonial "subject," as well as of theCategories by means of which this subject conceives itself and perceivesThe world within which it lives and acts. (See subjectunder poststructuralist.)The subaltern has become a standard way to designateThe colonial subject that has been constructed by European discourseAnd internalized by colonial peoples who employ this discourse;

Rank, and combines The Latin terms for "under" (sub) and "other" (alter).

                                   A recurrent Topic of debate is how, and to what extent, a subaltern subject, writing In a European language, can manage to serve as an agent of resistance against, rather than of compliance with, the very discourse that has created its subordinate identity. See, e.g., Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988), reprinted in The PostcolonialStudies Reader, listed below.(3)A major element in the postcolonial agenda is to disestablish EurocentricNorms of literary and artistic values, and to expand the literary Canon to include colonial and postcolonial writers. In the UnitedStates and Britain, there is an increasingly successful movement to include, in the standard academic curricula, the brilliant and innovativeNovels, poems, and plays by such postcolonial writers in theEnglish language as the Africans Chinua Achebe and Whole Soyinka, The Caribbean islanders V. S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott, and the authorsFrom the Indian subcontinent G. V. Desani and SalmanRushdie.

                         See Homi Bhabha, the Location of Culture (1994); and for a Survey of the large and growing body of literature in English by postcolonial Writers throughout the world, see Martin Coyle and others,Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism(1990), A comprehensive anthology is The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (1995), Ed.Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth(trans., 1966); Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Edward W. Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (1990); Christopher L. Miller, Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology In Africa (1990); Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993).

British Cultural Materialism:-

Cultural studies are referred to as “cultural materialism” in Britain, and it has a long tradition. In the later nineteenth century Matthew Arnold sought to redefine the “givens” of British culture. Edward Burnett’s pioneering anthropological study primitive culture argued that “culture or civilization, taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is a complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”(1).Claude Levi-Strauss’s influence moved British thinkers to assign “culture” to primitive peoples and then with the work of British scholars like Raymond Williams to attributes culture to the working class as well as the elite. As Williams memorably states: “there are no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses”.

                   To appreciate the importance of this revision of “culture” we must situate it within the controlling myth of social and political reality of the British Empire upon which the sun never set an ideology left over the previous century. In modern Britain two trajectories for “culture” developed. This cultural materialism furnished of leftist orientation “critical of the aestheticism, formalism, ant historicism and common among the dominant post war methods of academic literary criticism” Such was the description in the Johns Hopkins guide to literary Theory and criticism.

                   Cultural materialism began in earnest in the 1950 with the work of F.R.Leavis heavily influenced by Matthew Arnold’s analyses of bourgeois culture. Leavisites promoted the “great tradition” of Shakespeare and Milton to improve the moral sensibilities of a wider range of readers than just the elite. Inspired  by Karl Marx, British theorists were also influenced by Gorgy Lukas ,Theodor Adorn, Louis Althusser, Max Horkheimer, MikhilYachting, and Antonio Gramsci.Walter Benjamin attacked fascism by questioning the value of what he called the “aura” of culture. Benjamin helps explain the frightening cultural context for a film such as lenis Rifesta’s trimph of the will (1935) Lukach developed what he called a reflection theory.

Deconstruction and Derrida

   Name :- Rathod Zindagi V.

    Roll : 13

    Part :- I Sem. II

Paper:- E-C-203: Literary Criticism

Topic:-    Deconstruction and Derrida

                                                             

           

   Submitted to,                                                          

              Dr. Dilip Barad,                                                      

              Department of English                       

              Bhavnagar University

v What is Deconstruction?

                   Deconstruction, as applied in the criticism of literature, designates a theory and practice of reading which questions and claims to “subvert” or “undermine”, the assumption that the system of language provides grounds that are adequate to establish the boundaries, the coherence or unity, and the determinate meaning of a literary text. Typically, a deconstructive reading sets out to show the conflicting forces within the text to dissipate the seeming definiteness of its structure and meaning into indefinite array of incompatibility and undecidable possibilities.

                    Derrida presented his basic views in the three books in 1967, since entitled,

                ‘Grammatology’, ‘writing and difference’, and ‘speech and phenomena’.

                     Derrida’s reiterated claim is that not only all western philosophies  and theories of the language, but all western use of language, hence all western culture, are ‘logo centric’, that is they are centered or grounded on a ‘logos’ or as started in a phase, he adopts from Heidegger, they rely on ‘metaphysics of presence’. They are logo centric, according to Derrida, in part because they are‘phonocentric’ that is they grant, implicitly or explicitly, logical‘priority’ or ‘privilege’, to speech over writing as the model for analyzing all discourse.

                     Derrida’s view is that we can never, in any instance of speech or writing, have a demonstrably fixed and decidable meaning in an utterance on text, but asserts that these are merely effects and lack a ground that would justify certainly in interpretation.

                     Derrida was the most influential philosopher in 70s and 80s of last century. His philosophy is the further extension ofstructuralism and is better called as ‘post- structuralism’. He carries this structuralist movement to its logical extreme and his reasoning is original and startling. We have seen in this movement that as in New Criticism, the attention was shifted from the writer to the work of literary text; consequently textual analysis becomes more important than extra textual information. Further the author disappeared and only the text remained. This is what we called thestylistic and structuralist position.

                       The meaning as it emerges from the text alone counted. In this process the importance of the reader and his understanding increased, and the Reader Response or Reception.Theory came into being. Derrida gives the same process a further and final push according to which what matters is the reading and not the writing of the text. At times one feels, through not quite justifiably, that in Derrida even the text disappears and what is left behind is an individual’s reader response to it. Now the reader rules the supreme, and the validity of his reading cannot be challenged. However, the stricter of each reading has to be coherent and convincing.

v Decentering the centre:

                        Derrida deconstructs the metaphysics of presence. That is to say that according to Derrida there is no presence or truth apart from language. He seeks to prove that the structure of the structure does not indicate a presence above its free play of signs. This presence was earlier supposed to be the centre of the structure which was paradoxically through to be within, and outside this structure, it was truth and within, it was intelligibility.

                        But Derrida contends that, ‘the centre could not be through in the form of a being presence’ and that in any given text, there is only a free play of an infinite number of sign substitutions. A word is explained by another word which is only a word not an existence. Thus a text is all words which are just words, not indicative of any presence beyond them. In the words of John Sturrock,

             “The resort to language or sign entails, we know the loss of all uniqueness and immediate. The sign is not the thing in itself.”

                          It is utteractive or repeatable. A sign which was uttered only once would be not sign. It is the types of which each utterance is token.

                         There is no a textual origin of a text. The author’s plan of a book is a text. His realization is no truth, where, the text where summary is third text. A text kindles a text and text seeks to present or explain. There is no reality other than texuality. The texuality is the free play of signifies. There is no signified that is not itself a signifier.

                           In the words of John Sturrock, Derrida seeks to undermine “a prevailing and generally unconscious ‘idealism’, which asserts that language does not create meanings but reveals them, thereby implying that meaning, pre- exists their expression.” This for Derrida is nonsense. For his there can be no meaning which is not formulated, we cannot reach outside language.

v Supplementarity:

                           The concept of Supplementarity follows from Decentrring the centre. A literary text is a work of language and language as such according to Derrida, is like time, ever in a state of Flux. Just as time has no emergence of man, and will disappear along with man.

                          Derrida quotes and approves Levi-Strauss who writes:

            “Whatever may have been the moment and the circumstances of its appearance in the scale of animal life, language could only have been in one full swoop. Things could not have set about signifying progressively but rather of biology and psychology a crossing over came about from a stage where nothing had a meaning to another where everything possessed.”

                           But language being a flux is not ever the same. It is always gaining in new elements and loosing the older ones. “The totality of the myths of a people”, Derrida quotes Levi- Strauss again,

               “Is of the order of the discourse. Provided that these people do not become physically or morally extinct, this totality is never extinct. Such a criticism would therefore be equivalent to reproaching a linguist with writing the grammar of a language without having recorded the totality of the words which have been uttered since that language came into existence and without knowing the verbal exchanges which will take place as long as the language continues to exist.”

                            Totalisation is thus useless and impossible. The language paradoxically comes into being as a quest of imaginary truth apart from language and continues to realize the lack of truth in the words that it employs. The free play of signifies, “a field of infinite substitutions in the closure of a finite ‘ensemble’ permitted by the lack.”

                        v Conclusion:

                        “Derrida emphasizes that to deconstruct is not to destroy; that his task is to ‘dismantle the metaphysical and rhetorical structures’ operative in a text ‘not in order to reject or discard them, but to reconstitute them in another way.’-that he puts into question the ‘search for the signified not annual it, but to understand it within a system to which such a reading is blind.’

-         M.H. Abram