Title of Things Fall Apart

''Title of Things Fall Apart''
🌺💐🍁🌸👇

The title of Achebe's novel ''Things Fall Apart'' owes to William Butler Yeats'1921 ''visionary''poem ,''The Second Coming''.Yeats speaks of the break-down of the ''old'' order and its displacement by a ''new'' order that rouses mixed feelings of revulsion and fascination in him.So the title is a kind of tribute to Yeats' mysticism.
''Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon can not hear the falconer
Things Fall Apart;the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world''.

Achebe would have most carefully chosen both the epigraph and title as his novel,is too about a forcible break-up of an older and settled order.Achebe is preoccupied with things falling apart,the break-down of the ''old'' order under the relentless onslaught of the ''new'' order.

The significance of a title increases when it hints at the theme of the book.The very title''Things Fall Apart'',highlights the process of disintegration of Ibo culture and society.Achebe looks back at his Ibo society specifically at the period the white man broke into it and''mere anarchy''loosed upon the world of Umuofia.
The major theme of the novel is that British colonoization and the conversation to christianity of tribal people has destroyed an intricate and old pattern of life in Africa.Dealing with the theme of chaos and disruption,Achebe's selection of title is not only proper,suggestive and accurate but a true reflection and the mirror to its theme.

Things Fall Apart,is about a clan which once thought like one,spoke like one,shared a common awareness and acted like one.The white man came and his coming broke this unity.As Obierika says,

''The white man is very clever.He came quitely wand peaceably with his religion.....Now he has won our brothers,and our clan can no longer act like one''.
Achebe cooly analyses the ways of invaders that cause disintegration and so,ultimately things fall apart.

Their very first tool is force.To avert their tragedy the Abame people kill the white man.A military against Abame follows.During this retaliation the village is wiped out as Obierika asserts,
''Everybody is killed,except the old and the sick who were at home and a handful of men and women whose chi were wide awake...Even the sacred fish in their mysterious lake have fled and the lake has turned the colour of blood''.

This fate of Abame stopes Mbanta people to do any act and consequently things became to fall apart at random.

The whiteman introduced christianity which is all embracing.Any human being is acceptable even the Osu,the outcast clansman became converted.At first it is the efulefu and osu only.Moreover,new religion gives answer to some of the vague questions that have hitherto haunted some people.Thus Nwoye feels he has the answer to the death of Ikemefuna and the casting away of twins that cry in the bush until they die.In this way,the new religion gains ground and things fall apart instantly.

Moreover,the religion brings with itself a strong government and peaceful trade.The people become more prosperous.As Achebe says in the course of his narrative.

''The white man had indeed brought a lunatic religion,but he had also built a trading store and for the first time palm-oil and kernel became the things of great price,and much money flowed into Umofia''.

The people prefer having the lucrative commerce to pointlessly attacking the whiteman and his religion.By and by they lost their devotion against invaders and consequently things fall apart.

Thus the title of the novel is like the signboard of a shop.Just as a signboard indicates the the goods that are sold in the shop,so the suggested title of novel gives a clear indication as to the contents,theme,and symbolism of the novel.Achebe titles like Joseph Conrad's are always well-chosen and respond to his thematic ideas as we see his titles like ''No Longer At Ease'',''Arrow of God and Burning Grass''.

As the history based upon stories and the great tragedies are well named after the central figure[the kings or the tragic hero] e.g ''Oedipus Rex''.Similarly the title for the German edition of TFA is Okonkwo.This is an apt recognition of Okonkwo's role.The main intention of the title may therefore be to emphasize that this novel tells Okonkwo's story.And this emphasis is renowned time and again at its most credible and crucial moments in the story.

Gradually,that people lost their unity.Obierika's remark is very significant and similar to the title:
''He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart''.

And these things that held these people together are their local traditions,culture,religion of various gods and godesses,laws and a sense of belonging.

However it is Achebe's task in TFA to objectively and dispassionately access the various reasons for the break-up of that order__an older order and settled way of life.He analyses the inflexibilities within the Igbo social formation that ultimately led to wholesome disaster.
Some of these reasons are the rigid social structure which isolates the Osu,demarcation between a man's and a woman's role,the overconfidence of the tribal people in their attitude towards the ''new'' religion and the lack of unity.These drawbacks of their society lead to things fall apart.

Things Fall Apart opens at the height of Okonkwo's fame which he wins through ''Solid personal achievements'' and ends with his tragic death.The whole story revolves around Okonkwo.But this does not mean that the story is essentially about Okonkwo.It is about whole clan,a whole civilization.It is not the tragedy of a single man but of whole community of Umuofia.So there is no doubt about the appropriateness of the title,Things Fall Apart.

To conclude,the title of the book,Things Fall Apart is very revealing when Achebe says, things fall apart he means that there is disintegration,the breaking into pieces of a thing hitherto intact__the social pattern of Ibos.
With the inroads of new European ideas into the Tgbo Society.The old traditional pattern of society begins to flater,things began to fall apart,traditional beliefs,old practices,beliefs in the earth godesses and the ancestral spirits,all these begin to recieve assaults in the hands of white people and society begins to break into pieces with opposing views and thus the ''Centre cannot hold''.All this explains the reason for Chinua Achebe's choice of the title___''Things Fall Apart''.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets (((((Themes, Motifs & Symbols)))))

Shakespeare’s Sonnets

(((((Themes, Motifs & Symbols)))))

👉👉👉Themes

👉DIFFERENT TYPES OF ROMANTIC LOVE

Modern readers associate the sonnet form with romantic love and with good reason: the first sonnets written in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy celebrated the poets’ feelings for their beloveds and their patrons. These sonnets were addressed to stylized, lionized women and dedicated to wealthy noblemen, who supported poets with money and other gifts, usually in return for lofty praise in print. Shakespeare dedicated his sonnets to “Mr. W. H.,” and the identity of this man remains unknown. He dedicated an earlier set of poems, Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece, to Henry Wriothesly, earl of Southampton, but it’s not known what Wriothesly gave him for this honor. In contrast to tradition, Shakespeare addressed most of his sonnets to an unnamed young man, possibly Wriothesly. Addressing sonnets to a young man was unique in Elizabethan England. Furthermore, Shakespeare used his sonnets to explore different types of love between the young man and the speaker, the young man and the dark lady, and the dark lady and the speaker. In his sequence, the speaker expresses passionate concern for the young man, praises his beauty, and articulates what we would now call homosexual desire. The woman of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the so-called dark lady, is earthy, sexual, and faithless—characteristics in direct opposition to lovers described in other sonnet sequences, including Astrophil and Stella, by Sir Philip Sidney, a contemporary of Shakespeare, who were praised for their angelic demeanor, virginity, and steadfastness. Several sonnets also probe the nature of love, comparing the idealized love found in poems with the messy, complicated love found in real life.

👉THE DANGERS OF LUST AND LOVE

In Shakespeare’s sonnets, falling in love can have painful emotional and physical consequences. Sonnets 127–152, addressed to the so-called dark lady, express a more overtly erotic and physical love than the sonnets addressed to the young man. But many sonnets warn readers about the dangers of lust and love. According to some poems, lust causes us to mistake sexual desire for true love, and love itself causes us to lose our powers of perception. Several sonnets warn about the dangers of lust, claiming that it turns humans “savage, extreme, rude, cruel” (4), as in Sonnet 129. The final two sonnets of Shakespeare’s sequence obliquely imply that lust leads to venereal disease. According to the conventions of romance, the sexual act, or “making love,” expresses the deep feeling between two people. In his sonnets, however, Shakespeare portrays making love not as a romantic expression of sentiment but as a base physical need with the potential for horrible consequences.

Several sonnets equate being in love with being in a pitiful state: as demonstrated by the poems, love causes fear, alienation, despair, and physical discomfort, not the pleasant emotions or euphoria we usually associate with romantic feelings. The speaker alternates between professing great love and professing great worry as he speculates about the young man’s misbehavior and the dark lady’s multiple sexual partners. As the young man and the dark lady begin an affair, the speaker imagines himself caught in a love triangle, mourning the loss of his friendship with the man and love with the woman, and he laments having fallen in love with the woman in the first place. In Sonnet 137, the speaker personifies love, calls him a simpleton, and criticizes him for removing his powers of perception. It was love that caused the speaker to make mistakes and poor judgments. Elsewhere the speaker calls love a disease as a way of demonstrating the physical pain of emotional wounds. Throughout his sonnets, Shakespeare clearly implies that love hurts. Yet despite the emotional and physical pain, like the speaker, we continue falling in love. Shakespeare shows that falling in love is an inescapable aspect of the human condition—indeed, expressing love is part of what makes us human.

👉REAL BEAUTY VS. CLICHÉD BEAUTY

To express the depth of their feelings, poets frequently employ hyperbolic terms to describe the objects of their affections. Traditionally, sonnets transform women into the most glorious creatures to walk the earth, whereas patrons become the noblest and bravest men the world has ever known. Shakespeare makes fun of the convention by contrasting an idealized woman with a real woman. In Sonnet 130, Shakespeare directly engages—and skewers—clichéd concepts of beauty. The speaker explains that his lover, the dark lady, has wires for hair, bad breath, dull cleavage, a heavy step, and pale lips. He concludes by saying that he loves her all the more precisely because he loves her and not some idealized, false version. Real love, the sonnet implies, begins when we accept our lovers for what they are as well as what they are not. Other sonnets explain that because anyone can use artful means to make himself or herself more attractive, no one is really beautiful anymore. Thus, since anyone can become beautiful, calling someone beautiful is no longer much of a compliment.

👉THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF BEING BEAUTIFUL

Shakespeare portrays beauty as conveying a great responsibility in the sonnets addressed to the young man, Sonnets 1–126. Here the speaker urges the young man to make his beauty immortal by having children, a theme that appears repeatedly throughout the poems: as an attractive person, the young man has a responsibility to procreate. Later sonnets demonstrate the speaker, angry at being cuckolded, lashing out at the young man and accusing him of using his beauty to hide immoral acts. Sonnet 95 compares the young man’s behavior to a “canker in the fragrant rose” (2) or a rotten spot on an otherwise beautiful flower. In other words, the young man’s beauty allows him to get away with bad behavior, but this bad behavior will eventually distort his beauty, much like a rotten spot eventually spreads. Nature gave the young man a beautiful face, but it is the young man’s responsibility to make sure that his soul is worthy of such a visage.

👉👉👉Motifs

👉ART VS. TIME

Shakespeare, like many sonneteers, portrays time as an enemy of love. Time destroys love because time causes beauty to fade, people to age, and life to end. One common convention of sonnets in general is to flatter either a beloved or a patron by promising immortality through verse. As long as readers read the poem, the object of the poem’s love will remain alive. In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 15, the speaker talks of being “in war with time” (13): time causes the young man’s beauty to fade, but the speaker’s verse shall entomb the young man and keep him beautiful. The speaker begins by pleading with time in another sonnet, yet he ends by taunting time, confidently asserting that his verse will counteract time’s ravages. From our contemporary vantage point, the speaker was correct, and art has beaten time: the young man remains young since we continue to read of his youth in Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Through art, nature and beauty overcome time. Several sonnets use the seasons to symbolize the passage of time and to show that everything in nature—from plants to people—is mortal. But nature creates beauty, which poets capture and render immortal in their verse. Sonnet 106 portrays the speaker reading poems from the past and recognizing his beloved’s beauty portrayed therein. The speaker then suggests that these earlier poets were prophesizing the future beauty of the young man by describing the beauty of their contemporaries. In other words, past poets described the beautiful people of their day and, like Shakespeare’s speaker, perhaps urged these beautiful people to procreate and so on, through the poetic ages, until the birth of the young man portrayed in Shakespeare’s sonnets. In this way—that is, as beautiful people of one generation produce more beautiful people in the subsequent generation and as all this beauty is written about by poets—nature, art, and beauty triumph over time.

👉STOPPING THE MARCH TOWARD DEATH

Growing older and dying are inescapable aspects of the human condition, but Shakespeare’s sonnets give suggestions for halting the progress toward death. Shakespeare’s speaker spends a lot of time trying to convince the young man to cheat death by having children. In Sonnets 1–17, the speaker argues that the young man is too beautiful to die without leaving behind his replica, and the idea that the young man has a duty to procreate becomes the dominant motif of the first several sonnets. In Sonnet 3, the speaker continues his urgent prodding and concludes, “Die single and thine image dies with thee” (14). The speaker’s words aren’t just the flirtatious ramblings of a smitten man: Elizabethan England was rife with disease, and early death was common. Producing children guaranteed the continuation of the species. Therefore, falling in love has a social benefit, a benefit indirectly stressed by Shakespeare’s sonnets. We might die, but our children—and the human race—shall live on.

👉THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SIGHT

Shakespeare used images of eyes throughout the sonnets to emphasize other themes and motifs, including children as an antidote to death, art’s struggle to overcome time, and the painfulness of love. For instance, in several poems, the speaker urges the young man to admire himself in the mirror. Noticing and admiring his own beauty, the speaker argues, will encourage the young man to father a child. Other sonnets link writing and painting with sight: in Sonnet 24, the speaker’s eye becomes a pen or paintbrush that captures the young man’s beauty and imprints it on the blank page of the speaker’s heart. But our loving eyes can also distort our sight, causing us to misperceive reality. In the sonnets addressed to the dark lady, the speaker criticizes his eyes for causing him to fall in love with a beautiful but duplicitous woman. Ultimately, Shakespeare uses eyes to act as a warning: while our eyes allow us to perceive beauty, they sometimes get so captivated by beauty that they cause us to misjudge character and other attributes not visible to the naked eye.

Readers’ eyes are as significant in the sonnets as the speaker’s eyes. Shakespeare encourages his readers to see by providing vivid visual descriptions. One sonnet compares the young man’s beauty to the glory of the rising sun, while another uses the image of clouds obscuring the sun as a metaphor for the young man’s faithlessness and still another contrasts the beauty of a rose with one rotten spot to warn the young man to cease his sinning ways. Other poems describe bare trees to symbolize aging. The sonnets devoted to the dark lady emphasize her coloring, noting in particular her black eyes and hair, and Sonnet 130 describes her by noting all the colors she does not possess. Stressing the visual helps Shakespeare to heighten our experience of the poems by giving us the precise tools with which to imagine the metaphors, similes, and descriptions contained therein.

👉👉👉Symbols

👉FLOWERS AND TREES

Flowers and trees appear throughout the sonnets to illustrate the passage of time, the transience of life, the aging process, and beauty. Rich, lush foliage symbolizes youth, whereas barren trees symbolize old age and death, often in the same poem, as in Sonnet 12. Traditionally, roses signify romantic love, a symbol Shakespeare employs in the sonnets, discussing their attractiveness and fragrance in relation to the young man. Sometimes Shakespeare compares flowers and weeds to contrast beauty and ugliness. In these comparisons, marred, rotten flowers are worse than weeds—that is, beauty that turns rotten from bad character is worse than initial ugliness. Giddy with love, elsewhere the speaker compares blooming flowers to the beauty of the young man, concluding in Sonnets 98 and 99 that flowers received their bloom and smell from him. The sheer ridiculousness of this statement—flowers smell sweet for chemical and biological reasons—underscores the hyperbole and exaggeration that plague typical sonnets.

👉STARS

Shakespeare uses stars to stand in for fate, a common poetic trope, but also to explore the nature of free will. Many sonneteers resort to employing fate, symbolized by the stars, to prove that their love is permanent and predestined. In contrast, Shakespeare’s speaker claims that he relies on his eyes, rather than on the hands of fate, to make decisions. Using his eyes, the speaker “reads” that the young man’s good fortune and beauty shall pass to his children, should he have them. During Shakespeare’s time, people generally believed in astrology, even as scholars were making great gains in astronomy and cosmology, a metaphysical system for ordering the universe. According to Elizabethan astrology, a cosmic order determined the place of everything in the universe, from planets and stars to people. Although humans had some free will, the heavenly spheres, with the help of God, predetermined fate. In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 25, the speaker acknowledges that he has been unlucky in the stars but lucky in love, thereby removing his happiness from the heavenly bodies and transposing it onto the human body of his beloved.

👉WEATHER AND THE SEASONS

Shakespeare employed the pathetic fallacy, or the attribution of human characteristics or emotions to elements in nature or inanimate objects, throughout his plays. In the sonnets, the speaker frequently employs the pathetic fallacy, associating his absence from the young man to the freezing days of December and the promise of their reunion to a pregnant spring. Weather and the seasons also stand in for human emotions: the speaker conveys his sense of foreboding about death by likening himself to autumn, a time in which nature’s objects begin to decay and ready themselves for winter, or death. Similarly, despite the arrival of “proud-pied April” (2) in Sonnet 98, the speaker still feels as if it were winter because he and the young man are apart. The speaker in Sonnet 18, one of Shakespeare’s most famous poems, begins by rhetorically asking the young man, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” (1). He spends the remainder of the poem explaining the multiple ways in which the young man is superior to a summer day, ultimately concluding that while summer ends, the young man’s beauty lives on in the permanence of poetry.

))Theme of immortality in Shakespeare's 'Sonnet 18' and 'Sonnet 55'(())))

(())))Theme of immortality in Shakespeare's 'Sonnet 18' and 'Sonnet 55'(())))

The power of immortality is one of the main themes in William Shakespeare's 'Sonnet 18' and 'Sonnet 55'. It is a stock theme which had been used by many poets, but nearly all of them were mainly concerned with their own fame in the future. Shakespeare uniquely thinks poetry as a tool to immortalize his friend. He is not concerned with his own glory.The Roman poets say: “Because of my poems I will never die”. But Shakespeare says: “Because of my poems you will never die”.

What distinguishes Shakespeare is that he values the identity of his friend and wants to immortalize him through his verses. Both in 'Sonnet 18' and 'Sonnet 55', we find an impassioned burst of confidence as the poet claims to have the power to keep his friend’s memory alive forever.

In 'Sonnet 18', the poet starts with his hyperbolic attitude towards his friend:

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:"

Comparing his friend's beauty to that of a summer's day, the poet says that his friend outshines the summer day by far in respect of beauty because a summer day has many defects. Comparing the transient beauty of a summer's day the friend of the poet is more lovely and lively. Unlike summer's beauty, the beauty of his friend is eternal as well. Here, Shakespeare is haunted by the fear of death. He knows that the icy hands of death will be laid upon all alike.

"And every fair from fair sometimes declines

By chance, or natures changing course, untrimmed."

So, the poet seeks for an alternative way to preserve the 'unalloyed' beauty of his friend. He tries to immortalize the beauty of his friend by his powerful verses.

In the final coupler of 'Sonnet 18', the poet re-affirms his hopes that 'so long' as mankind lives and 'so long: as they read this poem,  the memory of the fair youth of his friend will remain alive to the coming generations of mankind and the friend of the poet will never be the victim of forgetfulness or death.

"So long as man can breathe or eyes can see

So long lives this and this gives life to thee."

In 'Sonnet 55' also, Shakespeare intends to immortalize his friend through his poetry. At the very beginning he expressed his firm belief that nothing shall outlive his 'powerful verses'. He says:

"Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhymes. "

For him, poetry will last longer than the great monuments which were built to immortalize the great kings and princes.  Shakespeare says that the memory of his friend will be immortalized through his poetry because time will not affect it and it will outlive everything as time can affect only the material things like the marbles and monuments. It can't affect poetry because poetry is kept in books and the minds of the people.

Shakespeare boldly claims that the memory of his friend that he recorded in his 'powerful rhymes' will never be burnt/erased by any natural or man-made phenomena.  He says:

"Not mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn

The living record of your memory."

He says that everything will be ruined- like the monuments will be besmeared by time, the statues and masonry will be destroyed by wars or civil disturbance- but his friend will remain alive through his poems. He claims that even the sword of the Mars ( Roman god of war) and fire of war cannot erase the 'living record ' of his friend's memory.

Also his friend's memory will not be affected by the oblivion that comes with enmity and death, will last and find room in the minds of coming generations.

"Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity

Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room

Even in the eyes of all posterity."

Like "Sonnet 18", in "Sonnet 55" also Shakespeare gives a bold declaration about the durability of his poem and immortality of his beloved friend. The final couplet states:

"So, till the judgment that yourself arise

You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes."

Shakespeare says that, till the judgment day comes, his friend's memory will live in this poem and he will live in the lovers' eyes when they read this sonnet as an expression of their own feelings for each other.
Both 'Sonnet 18' and 'Sonnet 55' express Shakespeare's devotion for his beloved friend. We can see his firm conviction about the durability of his writings too, but more than anything else what makes them unique is his bold declaration about the immortality of his friend that he created through his powerful verses in 'Sonnet 18'  and in 'Sonnet 55'.

__Shakespearean_Tragedy/ #__Shakespeare_as_a_Tragedy_Writer

#__Shakespearean_Tragedy/ #__Shakespeare_as_a_Tragedy_Writer

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. His surviving works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, two epitaphs on a man named John Combe, one epitaph on Elias James, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.

Shakespeare is perhaps most famous for his tragedies. Most of his tragedies were written in a seven-year period between 1601 and 1608. These include his four major tragedies  Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, along with Antony & Cleopatra,  Coriolanus,  Cymbeline, Julius Caesar, all of which are immediately recognizable, regularly studied and frequently performed.

Following are the salient features of his tragedies.

1.    Tragedy is concerned primarily with one person – The tragic hero.

2.    The story is essentially one of exceptional suffering and calamity leading to the death of the hero.  The suffering and calamity are, as a rule, unexpected and contrasted with previous happiness and glory.

3.    The tragedy involves a person of high estate.  Therefore, his or her fate affects the welfare of a whole nation or empire.

4.    The hero undergoes a sudden reversal of fortune.

5.    This reversal excites and arouses the emotions of pity and fear within the audience.  The reversal may frighten and awe, making viewers or readers of the play feel that man is blind and helpless.

6.    The tragic fate of the hero is often triggered by a tragic flaw in the hero’s character.

7.    Shakespeare often introduces abnormal conditions of the mind (such as insanity, somnambulism, or hallucinations).

8.    Supernatural elements are often introduced as well.

9.    Much of the plot seems to hinge on “chance” or “accident”.

10. Besides the outward conflict between individuals or groups of individuals, there is also an inner conflict and torment within the soul of the tragic hero.

The Hero, A Person Of High And Noble Birth

In Shakespearean tragedy, the hero is always a man of outstanding social status. He may be a king (as in King Lear and Julius Caesar), a prince (as in Hamlet), and a very high official (as in Othello and Macbeth) etc. In his conception of tragic hero, Shakespeare conforms to the tradition of the ancient Greek tragedies of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides and Roman tragedies of Seneca, and even the tragic conception of the Middle Ages. Bradley says:

‘The advantage of Shakespearean conception of the tragic hero is that his fall is more bewildering and conspicuous as contrasted to his former prosperity. Moreover, his fate affects the welfare of a whole nation or empire, therefore his tragedy is more enveloping and widespread.

Marlow’s heroes are also extraordinary personalities but they are from humble parentage. Both Marlow and Shakespeare use the name of the hero as the title of the play. Moreover, unlike Shakespeare’s, in Marlow’s tragedies there is an absence of female characters.

Sufferings And Death

              These heroes undergo a series of sufferings and hardships and torture. In the early tragedies, the form of this suffering is physical but in the later stages, it is not merely physical torture but mental upheaval which sways and rocks them. The hero, under the stress of these sufferings, appears shaken in spite of his greatness and heroic capacity for suffering. Hamlet by his mental torture is virtually laid on the rock. Othello experiences a tempest in his very soul. Lear turns mad. Macbeth loses all interest in life and is obliged to characterize it as

                              A tale told by an idiot,

                              Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Character Is Destiny

              In Shakespearean tragedy it is the character of the hero which becomes the important factor to decide his destiny. In fact character is destiny. However, exaggerated this may seem to some critics, it is a fact that it is the character that moulds the action of the play. This fact becomes more important because in the Greek tragedy, it is the plot which becomes most important factor but in Shakespearean tragedy, it is first the character that is significant. After all there is hardly any action in Hamlet yet it is one of the most fascinating tragedies in English literature.

Hamartia/Tragic Flaw

              There is a certain tragic flaw in the character of the hero, which Aristotle termed as “Hamartia” and which provides the ground for the calamity which eventually overwhelms him. Bradley observes:

                  ‘Lear’s tragedy is the tragedy of dotage and short-sightedness, Othello’s that of credulity, Hamlet’s that of indecision, Macbeth’s that of ambition, Antony’s that of neglect of duty and so on’.

In Shakespeare, we find a variety of tragic flaws, while in Marlow’s tragedies, the Hamartia is common and that is “Uncontrolled Ambition”.

The Conflict

               

              The conflict is of two kinds, both of which generally go on simultaneously in Shakespearean tragedy. Antony’s mind is torn between the opposite pulls of love and duty; Macbeth’s between those of ambition and duty. In Romeo and Juliet and Richard II, the conflict is almost entirely external. A lot of bloodshed is generally found in Shakespearean tragedy.

In Marlow’s tragedies, the conflict is only internal, within the mind and heart of the hero. Further, he didn’t pay much importance to chance happening.

Role Of Chance

Chance plays an important role in the tragedy of the hero. In Romeo and Juliet it is by chance that the hero does not get the Friar's message about the potion, and the heroine does not awake from her long sleep a little earlier. In Hamlet it was a chance that Hamlet's ship was attacked by the pirates and he was back in Denmark to face the tragic end. Some people think that the introducing the element of chance is to manipulate the action of the play to suit one’s own purposes. But this is not correct because chance or accident is as much of a real life as any normal happening. But where Shakespeare has proved superior to many other playwrights is that he keeps the role of chance within the probable limits. He does not allow even chance or accident to take more importance than the character of the hero.

Supernatural Elements

           

              Shakespeare’s plays give a large place to the supernatural. This is because he wrote for an audience which had a liking for the fabulous and the marvelous.

              There are Witches in Macbeth, Ghost in Hamlet, Hautboy music in Antony and Cleopatra. These have a close relation with the abnormal conditions of minds of the protagonists. Hamlet’s mobility of mind is connected with the appearance of ghost in the first act and in mother’s closet. Macbeth’s lust for power is aroused by the witches.

No Poetic Justice

               

              In the region of poetic justice where virtue is rewarded and vice punished, Shakespeare has his own laws which are the laws of the living world and not of a theory. In Shakespeare’s tragedies, we find that it is not only the evil that is punished but along with it the good and virtuous has to suffer. Yet it is true to nature that Shakespeare knows once the evil is afoot it will also take in its train goodness too.

DR. JOHNSON’S VIEWS ABOUT SHAKESPEARE

              Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) in his Preface to Shakespeare pointed out many merits and demerits of Shakespeare’s dramatic art. The greatest merit of Shakespeare’s plays, according to him, is the universality of their appeal. This is a result of the fact that the plays are based on the truthful observation of general human nature. His plays have stood the test of time and remain fresh and relevant upon numerous re-readings. There is a timeless and universal quality about his characters.  Whereas in the works of other dramatists a character is often individual, in those of Shakespeare it is frequently a species.

              Unlike most of the dramatists Shakespeare does not confine himself to themes of love only. There are several other human passions that move the human mind and Shakespeare uses them in his plots as subject-matter.

              Johnson appreciates the mingling of tragedy and comedy in Shakespeare’s plays. He is of the view that such plays accurately reflect the state of things in the world where the loss of someone is gain for the other. Comedy seems to have been closer to Shakespeare’s genius than tragedy, therefore we find him providing comic scenes even in his histories and tragedies.

              Shakespeare is criticized by the neo-classical critics because his plays do not observe the three unities of time, place and action. Johnson does not agree with them and attempts to a strong defense of Shakespeare’s practice. According to him the only important unity is that of action, which Shakespeare does observe.

              Dr. Johnson also points out some flaws of Shakespeare i.e. absence of poetic justice, loose plot structure and disregard for didacticism (moral purpose) etc.

Bertrand Russell PU UOS 2003 to 2022A Past paper of Prose MA ENGLISH LITERATURE

Past paper of Prose Bertrand Russell PU UOS 2003 to 2022A

Explain Russell’s ideas in the superior virtue of the obsessed. (PU 2018)

What safeguards does Russell suggest against a teacher's becoming a tool in the hands of governments and how far are they adequate? 2003

Which of the prose writers included in your course is your favourite, and why? 2003

Do you think Bertrand Russell's proposal for the establishment of a world government is desirable, or even tenable? 2004

In how many ways have ideas concerned with moral and politics, according to Bertrand Russell, helped mankind? 2004

YEAR 2005
Affirm or refute Russell's bid to justify the winning of happiness in this raving, reeling age of ours.

YEAR 2006
Can ideas, good or bad, be so effective as Bertrand Russell has claimed? Make out a case for or against in the light of his 'Unpopular Essays'.

YEAR 2007
. Even when theoretic and imaginative, Russell never departs from practicality and empiricism. Elaborate with special reference to his Unpopular Essays.

Russell's views on teaching and education have been of immense use down the years. Elaborate with special reference to his Unpopular Essays.

YEAR 2008
What are the practical difficulties in employing ideal teachers and how can they be overcome? Discuss with reference to Russell's 'Unpopular Essays'.

Discuss Russell's Essays in terms of their relevance to the development of human beings in terms of becoming more practical and rational creatures.

YEAR 2009
What according to Bertrand Russel is the necessary connection between philosophy and politics?

YEAR 2010
Can we check the social, economic and political decline if we succeed in making our teachers impartial and neutral in the real sense of the word? Elaborate with reference to Russell's 'Unpopular Essays'.

YEAR 2011
3. Russell was apposed to all obscurantism, mysticism and dogmatism. How far has he incorporated this approach in his 'Unpopular Essays'?

YEAR 2012
3. Discuss the "The Ideas that have Helped Mankind" as discussed by Russell.

YEAR 2013
3. Russell says, "I have spoken of liberty as a good, but it is not absolute good". Tell why, keeping in mind The Future of Mankind.

YEAR 2014
What safeguards does Russell suggest against a teacher becoming a tool in the hands of government in "Functions of Teacher". (PU 2014)

Discuss the main argument in philosophy for laymen in Russell (PU 2016)

What does Russell argue in ‘on Being modern minded’? (PU 2016)

What Safegaurd does Russell suggest against a teacher becoming a tool in the hands of Government in ‘Function of a Teacher’? (PU 2014)

How does Russell deal with paradox of violence and peace in his essays that you have read? (PU 2017)

Drawing upon your reading of Russell, discuss how does he envisage the role of teacher in the modern world? (PU 2017)

Discuss Russell’s prose style. (PU 2017)

24. Explain Russell’s ideas in the superior virtue of the obsessed. (PU 2018)

21. How is philosophy relevant to a lay man in russel. 2019 supply

22. What ideas, according to Bertrand Russell, have harmed mankind? (2019)

23. Discuss the prose style of Bertrand Russell. (2019)

24.Why does Russel attach so much importance to the role of teacher in modern civilization? Give your argument. 2022 A/2021 A/2020s

25. Russel is a liberal humanist rationalist. Prove or refute. 2021s

Russel

Liberalism

Humanism

Rationalism

Write note on ideas harmful for mankind. 2021 s

 

UOS PAST PAPERS

The future of man kind 2022 A

  UOS PAST PAPERS

Critically evaluate Russell's style. (UOS 2014)

For Russell, Teacher is the guardian. Agree or disagree. (UOS 2008)

. What is the function of a teacher in a civilized society according to Russell? (UOS 2009)

. Russell's prose is characterized by clarity, catholic temper and subtle wit. Explain. (UOS 2010)

. Write a comprehensive note on Russell's prose style. (UOS 2011)

. Russell was against war and in favour of world government. Why? (UOS 2011)

Russell preaches rationalism and tolerance. How and why? (UOS 2011)

Write an essay on Russell's prose style illustrating your answer from the 'Unpopular Essays'. (UOS 2012)

7. What is the function of a teacher in present day society according to Russell? (UOS 2012)

6. 'As to happiness, I am not so sure' bring out the significance of this reservation of Russell about ideas that helped mankind. (UOS 2013)

5. What future does Russell visualize for mankind as expressed in his essay 'Future of Mankind'? (UOS 2014)

How will you account Russell’s appeal to modern man? (UOS 2017)

Can Ideas good or bad, so effective as Betrand Russell has claimed. Make out a case for or against in the light of his ‘Unpopular Essays.’ (2017)

To what extend does Unpopular Essays represent Russell as an adversary dogmatism and a champion of liberalism? (UOS 2017)

PREPARED BY ASMA SHEIKH TUTOR

3 THEMES IN HEDDA GABLER

"FUNCTION OF A TEACHER" UNPOPULAR ESSAYS BY RUSSEL URDU/HINDI

The concept of Khudi (self) by Allama Iqbal explained by Zaid Hamid

Bacon’s “Essays”: A Reflection of the Renaissance Spirit

Bacon’s “Essays”: A Reflection of the Renaissance Spirit
MA English Annual System
University of Sargodha / Punjab
Pakistan

The Renaissance
The term ‘Renaissance’ means ‘rebirth’, or more generally, ‘revival’. It was the series of events by which Europe passed from a Medieval to a modern civilization. The Renaissance meant a revival of learning, and specially of the study of Greek which broke down the rigid conventions of the Middle ages. There was a new spirit of inquiry, of criticism, a passion for scientific accuracy, which was accompanied by a sense of individualism and worldliness. Its chief features are only too well reflected in the great prose writer of the age, Bacon. The essays have several features that show-the spirit of the Renaissance.

Pragmatical Spirit
A very important writer of the Italian Renaissance was Machiavelli, and the attitude he represents is quite typical of the age. An opportunistic philosophy that sacrificed high ethical ideals in the interests of achieving material progress, would not have been possible in the Middle ages but is the common spirit of the Renaissance. Bacon too teaches no ideal morality; he judges the Tightness of an action by the results it bears. Man is an individual and an end in himself and this sense of individualism gave rise to the feeling that he must know how to get on in this world. Thus we see Bacon advising his readers on how to become rich and influential, how to rise to high positions, how to exercise one’s power, and so on. Bacon does not consider it much of a drawback in a man to adopt crooked methods in order to achieve his ends. But here another spirit of the Renaissance asserts itself: the spirit of nationalism. It is to be noted that Bacon advocates even unethical ways but never at the expense of his country or state. The state is ever important and whatever men might do must be calculated to ensure the best for the country. Every thing that Bacon deals with has a utilitarian tone, so much so that even friendship is considered from the aspect of the advantages it can offer. Petitions can be granted to the undeserving person too if one likes the person. Compromise and expediency are the governing principles of Bacon’s advice. This concern for worldly success is one aspect of the spirit of the Renaissance.
Exploration, Adventure and Political Conquest
There was in the Renaissance a growing spirit of adventure and exploration. The importance of ‘great enterprise’ is mentioned often in the essays of Bacon. A country should make efforts at becoming great and powerful, and to this end should be ready to make war and become a military state. He gives practical advice to king and rulers on how to keep the subject under control and how to anticipate and avoid the dangers faced by the rulers. Not the essays of Empire and of Sedition. In the essay of the True Greatness of Kingdoms, Bacon gives a clear analysis of how to become a powerful state. Those were the days of naval wars and Bacon writes: “To be master of the seas is an abridgement of a monarchy.” His attitude towards war and peace is typical of the age in which there was tendency towards expansion of territory and power of a nation.
Classical Learning
The revival of classical learning and the study of ancient Greek and Roman literature and history was a hall-mark of the Renaissance. This spirit of learning is very much in the essays of Bacon. There are innumerable quotations from ancient writer that he employs to support his arguments. The several allusions to ancient history and the references to classical mythology are all evidence of the typical Renaissance culture. Latin writers like Tacitus, Seneca, Lucian, Lucretius, Virgil are often referred to and quoted from. There is hardly an essay that is free from these quotations or allusions. Classical mythology is often used to re-inforce his arguments. His love of learning is clearly portrayed in his essay, Of Studies, where he emphasises upon the advantages of books and studies. Many of his essays are heavy with learning. Note how he substantiates his arguments in the essay, of friendship, with instances from history.
Sensuousness
Though one would generally hesitate to ascribe the term ‘sensuous’ to Bacon, who is principally a philosopher-cum-politician, there are instances where this Renaissance feature is also to be found. The essay, Of Gardens, is one such example which shows him to be a keen lover of sensuous beauty:
“And because the breath of flowers is for sweeter in the air (where it comes and goes, like the warbling of music) than in the hand, therefore nothing is more fit for that delight than to know what be the flowers and plants that do best perfume the air.”
His love for singing and dancing and sheer spectacle comes out in his essay, Of Masques, though he quickly curbs this deviation into what he calls consideration of ‘toys’.
Wealth of Metaphor and Analogy
Yet another important characteristic of the Renaissance to be found in Bacon’s essays, is the abundant use of striking figures of speech. The metaphors and similes taken from different spheres of knowledge and experience reflect the exuberance of the age. To quote only a few sentences that have this typically rich, metaphorical quality,
1.       “It is heaven upon earth to have a man’s mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth.”                                                            (Of Truth)
2.       “For a crowd is not company, and forces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love,”                                             (Of Friendship)
3.       “...glorious gifts and foundations are like sacrifices without salt, and but the painted sepulchres of alms, which soon will putrefy and corrupt inwardly.                         
                                                                    (Of Riches)
Curiosity and Love of Travel
The sense of curiosity, and the love of increasing one’s knowledge is what prompts Bacon in his recommending travel for both the young and the old. The list that he makes of the things worth seeing are typical of the spirit of the Renaissance, It exhibits the tendency to know more and more about everything and every place.
An Exception
In one and only one aspect Bacon moves away from the spirit of the Renaissance. He does not reflect the ages’ pride in the English language. He preferred and admired Latin to English and in fact thought that the Latin version of his essays would be more popular. He apparently did not feel with others of his age that English could match the classical languages.
Conclusion
One can say that Bacon was a writer who represented the most salient features of his age, the age of the revival of learning and study of the ancients, the spirit of inquiry and individualism and nationalism.
It is easy to agree with the critic who says of Bacon that he was “the product of the Renaissance man’s glory, generous or terse, his opportunity of mind and body, his eye finely rolling across the subtlety and magnificence of the world, his joy in learning, discovering, weighing, or eating - all this as it existed in Bacon’s mind sifted through into the essays.”

HEART OF DARKNESS THINGS FALL APART AND REDERS RESPONSE THEORY

ACHEBE AS A NOVELIST

The Mill On The Floss by George Eliot

CULTURE AND ANARCHY BY METHEW ARNOLD IN URDU/ HINDI

SYMBOLIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THINGS FALL A PART IN URDU/HINDI

CULTURE AND ANARCHY BY METHEW ARNOLD IN URDU/HINDI

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#The_Faerie_Queene #Themes

#The_Faerie_Queene

#Themes

MA English Annual System
University of Sargodha

Instruction in Virtue

Spenser intended The Faerie Queene to be read primarily by young men desiring to learn better what virtues to cultivate in their lives. As such, the epic makes clear who the heroes and villains are, whom they represent, and what good behavior looks like. The most basic reading of The Faerie Queene is an education in proper living for 16th Century England.

Interdependence of the Virtues

The Faerie Queene makes it clear that no single virtue is greater than the rest. While some are superior to others, they require one another to strengthen the integrity of the whole person. For example, Redcrosse’s Holiness requires rescuing by Britomart’s Chastity, while Britomart’s Chastity seeks Justice to complete it in the social realm.

Chivalric Society and Social Classes

Spenser chose to set his epic in a romanticized medieval fantasy world full of knights, monsters, and damsels in distress. He uses this environment to give power to his allegorical statements, but at the same time, he includes an undercurrent of criticism for feudal Britain (and the class system his own age had inherited from it). Along with virtuous knights, Spenser includes noble savages (the Savage Man), honorable squires (Tristram), and even battle-hardened women (Britomart and Radigund). The knights, who are supposed to be the ideal of virtue, are often the most wrong-headed characters in the epic.

Christian Humanism

While ostensibly constructing an epic devoted to theological virtues of the Christian faith, Spenser cannot resist including his beloved classical mythology and legends in the work. Alongside the Redcrosse knight stands the half-satyr Satyrane; Calidone, the knight of Courtesy, spends time with rustic shepherds and a magical storyteller; and the virtuous Queen of England herself is depicted as Gloriana, Queen of the Faerie. To Spenser, there was no contradiction between classical aesthetic values and Protestant Christianity.

Protestantism versus Catholicism

Although The Faerie Queene can be read as a simple allegory of virtue, there are too many overt criticisms of the Catholic Church to keep the work theologically neutral. The monster Errour vomits Catholic tracts upon Redcrosse in Book 1, and Grantorto stands in for Catholicism as a whole in Book 6. Throughout the epic, Godliness is equated with Protestant theology, while falsehood and the destruction of lives are attributed to Catholic sources.

Chastity

Spenser makes much of female Chastity in The Faerie Queene, and not just in the book devoted to that virtue (Book 3). Britomart is the ideal of chastity, yet she does not seek to remain a maiden; her quest is to find the man she has fallen in love with and marry him. Belphoebe, the virgin huntress, eventually develops a relationship with Arthur’s squire Timias. Arthur himself looks forward to the day when he will woo and win the Faerie Queene herself. Each of these strong female figures points to the real-life Queen Elizabeth, whose continued celibacy caused great concern among many of her subjects (who feared she would leave no heir to continue her glorious reign). In some ways, the entire epic is not just dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I, but it also aims to change her mind and push her into accepting a suitor.

The Pervasive Effects of Slander

Through the Blatant Beast in Books 5 and 6, Spenser expounds the effects slander can have upon its victims. The Blatant Beast bites its prey, leaving them poisoned and dying. Only self-control, good living, and forthrightness of speech can cure them of their ills. Spenser uses the poisoning of Serena to show how a woman’s virtue can suffer even when she has done no wrong; he uses the poisoning of Timias following Belphoebe’s misperception of his intentions toward Amoretta to show a similar evil worked upon an upright man. Spenser had real-world counterparts in mind for these episodes: well-known political figures had been the victims of slander and could not escape its detrimental effects even after the allegations were disproved. The Blatant Beast is the one creature left alive by the questing knight: apparently, Slander is subject to repression (the Beast’s jaws can be bound for a while) but not complete elimination (the Beast still lives).

How far is Seamus Heaney justified in seeking the redress of poetry?

How far is Seamus Heaney justified in seeking the
redress of poetry?

The subject that Seamus
Heaney has treated, the redress of poetry, is not a new subject. The nature and purpose of poetry has been a subject of practical importance to every one who has an interest
in poetry. Heaney builds different
assumptions for the redress of poetry. The question is that whether, poetry is a useful activity in society; whether poetry is an aesthetic or a pragmatic work. There have been a lot of discussions whether poets and
poetry are of any use in the complexities
and miseries of life or not some are of the view that the poets are worthless people and
some condemned them as idle people. As plato is among the haters of poets and poetry. He had banished the poets from his ‘Republic’. Aristotle was of the view that the
poets are essential to keep balance in
society and they took us towards the ideal.
There were others also who kept defending poetry against all kinds of objections for instance, Sydney asserted that ‘The poet
takes us to the ideal’. So did Shelley
support poetry because poetry teaches the
perfect. Oscar wild said that life should
imitate art because art presents the perfect.
Arnold went to the extent of saying that all
that now goes in the name of religion or
philosophy will be replaced by poetry.
Sidney wrote in “Apology for Poetry” “Poets
are the unacknowledged legislators of the
World”. Heaney makes a fresh attempt to
defend poetry in this age of science and
technology when everyone Is becoming a
utilitarian and even education has been
commercialized. Poetry and Philosophy are
now considered idle mental luxuries while
commerce, computer and business
administration have been given the name of
education. Heaney starts his thesis by
distinguishing two planes of existence. Here
he quotes George Herbert’s poem ‘Pulley;
which suggests that the mind and aspiration
of the human beings turned towards the
heavenly inspite of all the pleasures and
penalties of being upon the earth. This can be done by poetic sixth sense which
provides a passage from the domain of the
matter of fact; into the domain of the
imagination. Here Heaney also quotes the
same explanation of religious experience by John Donne. Donne says God throws down in order to rise up. It s a religious paradox that sin brings man closer to God. This is how
Heaney concludes that these paradoxes are captured only by poetry. Heaney is of the opinion that the world of reality and the world of imagination are two different worlds but they depend upon each other and they
reinforce each other and this is the subject
of his poem “Squarings”. From this story,
Heaney concludes that there are two worlds,
our everyday world and the world of
visionary crew. Heaney keeps moving
between the world of fact and the world of imagination. He quotes from Pinskey to
support his argument. Pinskey in
“Responsibilites of The Poet” says that the poet has a responsibility to answer. He is to answer the question raised by life. Life raises questions and poet gives answers.
Seamus Heaney defends poetry on the
ground of utility also. He says poetry
focuses from delight to wisdom. He says the world of poetry is an answer to the world of fact. Life creates anxieties; Poetry tries to
relieve them. Life disturbs but poetry
consoles. It shows man the right path and
poetry has a power of sustaining man in
difficulties. These are the pragmatic
advantages of poetry. Heaney also defends
poetry on the level of its aesthetic utility.
We get pleasure out of words. Man comes to
wisdom through delight, not to delight
through wisdom. Man studies poetry to
amuse himself and to satisfy his soul but in
this psychological state he gets wisdom as
well. Thus, poetry is a pleasurable study of life. Poetry can very pleasantly and easily explore the subjects which are generally
denied by social, racial, sexual, and political prejudices and all this is done through the linguistic medium. But the poet has to take
care that while discussing these issues
poetry should not be sacrificed, Heaney says that the poets should not narrow down their scope by limiting poetry to certain
dimensions of time and space. It should be free from any restriction. Some demand that
the poets should write against the common
trend to shock the minds of the people.
They should write revolutionary poetry. But the impact of poetry is not practical, it is psychological. Poetry does not force man to go and fight. But poetry shows what is wrong and what is right. If poetry becomes practical, according to Heaney, it will not remain poetry, it will become a propaganda.
It is not the nature of poetry. Heaney quotes Wallace Stevens in order to evaluate his argument. Wallace says! Poetry creates an alternative world to the world of fact. Poetry
suggests what life ought to be. Poetry
makes sketches and plans. It shows
possibilities; it shows what is desirable.
Moreover, Poetry is about man. Poetry
promotes, love of men. Poetry shows that
all men are human beings and they deserve
sympathy. But politics tells us that some
people deserve sympathy and some deserve
our wrath. Poetry speaks of love for all
people: Politics forces people to kill other
people. In fact politics divides men. If
poetry becomes politics then it will not
remain poetry, it will become a propaganda
and in this way it will divide humanity into
friends and foes. For instance, the Irish men who were killed in the rising of 1916 . But he is also sorry for the Englishmen who died
in the fight. Talking about the humanitarian
zeal of poetry. Heaney says, that zeals
considers both enemies and friends as men.
He does not discriminate between the Irish People and the English people. Both were fighting for their ideals. That is exactly what poetry conveys to us, everyman whether black or white; Irish or English has the same feeling, passions and blood. Heaney raises an interesting point here which is also
shared by Edward Said in “Culture and
Imperialism” that the sensibility of the
people of the colonies is coloured by the
sensibility of the imperial masters. As the
Irish condemn the English but they use the English medium. Imperialism has inculcated in their minds a culture that they tried to reject. But this is also a very healthy experience. The Irish hate the English, still they love Shakespeare and Keats. To
conclude, Heaney tries to demonstrate that
poetry has a function in life, though not
ostentatious. The poet does nothing on
purpose, but poetry is a medium which by
its very nature serves a purpose. This can
be understood with reference to a statement
by Wordsworth that his poetry has a
purpose. It is not meaningless activity. But
this purpose is not imposed upon poetry.
Since Wordsworth lives a purposeful life,
therefore what ever he does has a purpose in it. Heaney believes that poetry can not be subjected to any particular direction and nor limited to any certain aspect of society. He emphasises that poets should elevate their services on universal level and poetry should be above all racial, social and political
prejudices. This is how he evaluates brighter sides and aspects of poetry in his essay
‘Redress of Poetry”

Seamus Heaney .. Discusses the concept of poetry from a number of angels, discuss.

Seamus Heaney .. Discusses the concept of poetry from a number of angels, discuss.

The essays in The Redress of Poetry have more cumulative force than individual character. Though seldom striking in themselves, they are convincing in their belief that poetic invention “represents not a submission to the conditions of [the] world but a creative victory over them.” If Heaney does not have the original prose voice of Auden or Eliot, he has maintained for English poetry a responsive, gratified and radical ear.  Redress of Poetry exhibits a number of themes, critical concerns and stylistic prose bytes. To achieve this, Heaney also also used many intertexual references.
For example, he refers to Herbert.  Herbert is an unexpected model, coming from the man who, more than anyone, speaks for civilization and decency in contemporary Ulster, a more polemicized hero seems to be in order. But Heaney has always had a bittersweet relationship to his community. In 1975, he made an early appearance on the international stage with his poem “Punishment.” This was around the time that the IRA began tarring and feathering Catholic women who dated British soldiers. Heaney compared those women’s bodies to that of a neolithic adulteress who had been stoned to death and dumped in a bog. He concludes:

My poor scapegoat, I almost love you but would have cast, I know, the stones of silence. I am the artful voyeur of your brain’s exposed
This is a far cry from Herbert’s clever machinations on Anglican theology. The choice of Herbert as a model is also a flagrant defiance of the poet with whom Heaney is too often compared: W.B. Yeats. (It takes Heaney five pages to use the Anglo-Irishman’s name.) This is understandable: enormous difference stands between the photographic mind that captured “Punishment” and the misty painter’s eyes that looked into Victorian medievalism and saw a Celtic Revival. We shall see whether Heaney can actually become Herbert, and what effect that attempt will have on his writing. In any case, he is, now in position to make the attempt.
Seamus Heaney wrote of the need to bring about a redress of poetry in modern poets. The concern indicated is the place that poetry should strive to attain in a socio-political setting. The idea is that poetry should function in redress of balance to unbalanced forces acting upon the world of the poet. This is such that the prevailing sentiments of the poet’s surroundings should shape and bend the nature of the focus of their writing. For example, Heaney states that an American poet writing during the Vietnam period should concern themselves with poetry that addresses the existing unrest in such a way as to bear a standard for the position of the author within the conflict also. In this the poet unsheathes his pen in the same manner as the soldier lifts his rifle, and towards the same goal, i.e. the elevation through victory, or the ode that praises it, of the position for which the warrior-poet strives. Thus the American “wave[s] the flag rhetorically”, just as the English poet, the German poet, or any other nationality elicits support and response from its poets as patriots of its cause. Though this can easily be anti-governmental as well, and poets are supposed to establish redress through support of revolution where that imbalance is detected also. Poetry, and the act of redress is a system of weights and counterweights, or to be more accurate reality and counter-reality. The poet sets up through his words a disparate view of a particular situation than would be readily apparent by having merely observed the situation. This creation of a counter-reality does in no way suggest a conflict with the presented reality and the observed reality, these two need not be placed into such direct opposition.
However, the reality suggested by a poet through their work should highlight a position in order to more easily show a concurrent yet different position, which the poet presents as a better scenario. This presentation need not be explicit. Nowhere in poetry must the poet in true expository style state the redress he wishes to make and support his position. It is up to the reader in trying to gain a true understanding, not only of the poet’s words, but of his position, to justify that position via the vision given him by the poet’s words. Perhaps a good place to begin in examining the issue of redress in poetry would be in Heaney’s own work “Requiem for the Croppies”. This is a poem that deals with a people’s need for redress, which is actively sought through warfare. This position can be gleaned by careful study of the poem, and is never expressly stated by Heaney.
In this particular piece, Heaney is attempting to speak to an audience about the difficulties he personally has observed in his native Ireland. To do this he utilizes the language which would be a common parlance for that region, and sets up with his readers a familiarity based on language between the reader, and the subjects of the poem. Heaney is careful, unlike some of his contemporaries and most of the literary models of excellence to refuse obscurity in his poem. This is of course obscurity both of language, and of reference. Such things, though they admittedly show a great knowledge, and creative use of the language would only serve in this instance to distance the reader from the subject Heaney is presenting. This linguistic style is also a matter of redress, and stems in large part from Heaney’s conscious or unconscious desire not to distance himself from his origins, but rather to exemplify them through the elegant simplicity of language. The redress of poetry is an issue that Heaney is remarkably adapted to presenting.
Throughout the 10 lectures reverberates the overall theme of redress — in its dictionary sense meaning reparation, and in one of its obsolete definitions suggesting “a course where something unhindered, yet directed, can sweep ahead into its full potential.” The first poem cited, Robert Frost’s allegorical “Directive,” commences with the hard monosyllabics of desolation, “Back out of all this now too much for us,” but glimpses nevertheless a potential order of things “beyond confusion” and implies “that the imaginative transformation of human life is the means by which we can most truly grasp and comprehend it.”  Poetry, Heaney states, is essentially an answer to the conditions of the world given in poetry’s own terms rather than the language of uplift. “To effect the redress of poetry, it is not necessary for the poet to be aiming deliberately at social or political change.” Which, of course, does not mean the poet dodges his civic responsibilities; only that poetry reconciles two orders, the practical and the poetic, the former teaching us how to live, the latter how to live more abundantly.  When Mr. Mandela’s writing rises to a noble statement, that statement has been earned. It has behind it the full weight of a life endured for the sake of the principles it affirms.
Consequently, there is genuine healing power rather than mere rhetorical uplift in Mr. Mandela’s espousal of the aims of the Durban conference, and the conference could well adopt as its sacred text something he wrote in his book, ”Long Walk to Freedom”: ”It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, black and white. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken away from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.”
With such personal, individual empathy, Mr. Mandela shows himself to be an artist of human possibility. He might well be called an activist, but he has a visionary understanding and would surely agree with the conviction that sustains.  Highly recommended for anyone to whom poetry is important and feels that most criticism seems to miss the point.  These lectures were originally conceived and delivered as individual pieces, but as a collection they also provide an account and defence of Heaney’s philosophy of poetry. Heaney deals with poems from the point of view of a reader to whom poetry is important as a means of understanding and coping with life — for whom, as he says, poetry is “strong enough to help”.  As literary criticism they are excellent (if eclectic), and are particularly valuable because they are free of much of the nonsense which creeps into academic commentary on poetry. This isn’t to say that Heaney always makes perfect sense, and a couple of the pieces veer towards self-indulgence; nevertheless they are extremely readable, stimulating and — an extremely rare thing in critical writing — inspiring.
In ‘The Redress of Poetry, Heaney wants now to speak directly to the issue of aesthetic release and its relation to ethical concern. This impossible and necessary relation is one interrogated afresh by artists in each generation….[He] suggests that the truest ethical concern for the writer must be the widening of consciousness, first on his own part and then perhaps on the part of his readers….But when the chief aspect of poetic utterance which is being appreciated is ethical intent–as in all the chant about ‘the personal is political’ and ‘the poetry of witness’–the time requires Heaney’s insistence on the irrepressibility of headlong imagination and spontaneous linguistic freedom which he finds not only in Marlowe but also in the comic energy of Merriman.
Heaney wants to think of poetry not only as something that intervenes in the world, redressing or correcting imbalances, but also as something that must be redressed–re-established, celebrated as itself. The criticism poets write is most often interesting because of their own poetry, but Heaney’s criticism would be read even if it were unbolstered by a contiguous poetic achievement. The essays are not always startlingly revisionary; they are the result of a deeply personal engagement that has been transmuted into what feels like common–communal–sense. Heaney has the most flexible and beautiful lyric voice of our age, and his prose often answers his poetry in a run of subtle and subtly resonant phrasing….The essays in ‘The Redress of Poetry’ have more cumulative force than individual character….If Heaney does not have the original prose voice of Auden or Eliot, he has maintained for English poetry a responsive, gratified, and radical ear. Heaney’s tendency is to look for the poet’s visionary prowess within a repressive social context. This is not a simple political stance…but the endurance of the poet’s words to envision either a Utopia or a chaotic universe entrapped by its priorities.
The position of a poet within the political and social movements of their times is a precarious one in that the poet has two public duties to fulfill, while at the same time has many personal obligations that cannot be negotiated or subsumed for any public option that might present itself.  Heaney often quotes Stephen Dedalus’s dictum that the poet, famous or not, unconsciously or not, “forge[s] the uncreated unconscience of the race,” and I think this is indicative of the tension and tradition from which Heaney himself must fall back upon and uphold.  This pulling, this turning of the head one way at one moment, another way the next second can prove to be quite debilitating when there is any sort of self-conscious self-reflection.  The poet remains hidden under layers of public namings and roles he must play, but at the same time has this inner privacy that tries desperately to remain unaltered and true to the poet’s techne, that all-encompassing descriptor of means and ends, teachable and unteachable.
But what does this mean for the poet, this moment of looking back and forward that remains perpetually encased in all uncoverings and disclosures?  For Heaney it remains essentially the pull between private and public, between personal motivations and wants and public demands and beckonings–those “daunting pressures and responsibilities on anyone who would risk the name of poet.”   Much of the time, Heaney remains focused towards his discipline, his techne, which is that of “Seamus Heaney, Nobel laureate poet.”  But is this what remains of Heaney after these namings are taken off?  What of the Heaney who sits in front of his fireplace reading Eastern European poets? What of the Heaney who talks to his wife on a nightly basis, and does the usual “person” duties that all of the masses who read his texts do?  What of the Heaney that is underneath the all-encompassing propaganda machine that is the literary trade in Western neo-liberal capitalist states?
The conflict of topos, figuratively and literally, is teased out throughout much of Heaney’s prose works.  He seems constantly lost within these dueling forces, who present to him no answers but more problems and questions in which the poet, consciously or not, answers with what Pinsky calls the “feel to answer, a promise to respond.”   But this response, as Heaney continues, throws the poet’s experience into a “labyrinth” from which the aporia of his situation arises and becomes pronounced as a poet to face and take heed of.  Heaney is taking his own frontiers of his written work and recasting it within the needed commentary of what it means to be a poet in a specific historical situation that seems to have no alternatives, no ways of curing the disease of contempt and historical baggage.  Heaney wants poetry to provide an alternative:
Poetry, that is, being instrumental in adjusting and correcting imbalances in the world, poetry as an intended intervention into the goings-on of society–even then, poetry is involved with supreme fictions as well as actual conditions.  What [poetry] is offering is a glimpsed alternative, a world to which ‘we turn incessantly and without knowing it.’
Poetry can do this, I think, to a certain event.  I would argue even more so in Ireland than in the United States, where poetry has fallen below many other forms of cultural creations and is now considered romantic entertainment by the catchy media conglomerates who control dissemination of ideas.  But with the Irish still caught up in troubles that are beyond borders and nationalities (all people everywhere should be worried about what is going on in  Ireland), it still remains to be seen what poetry can do for specific cultural/social realities.  I mean, honestly, is poetry going to provide an alternative political reality for someone stuck in a abusive/discriminatory social environment?  Is poetry going to provide some notion of truth that is obtainable by a populace of literate people?  Heaney comments:
To be a source of truth and at the same time a vehicle of harmony: this expresses what we would like poetry to be and it takes me back to the kinds of pressure which poets from Northern Ireland are subject to.  These poets feel with a special force a need to be true to the negative nature of the evidence and at the same time to show an affirming flame, the need to be both socially responsible and creatively free.
What Heaney is describing is something that is long past in his career and at the same time something he speaks of in the present tense–the need to be cognizant at all times the historical milieu that the artist, the poet is thrown in existentially, is under the influence of intellectually, and must respond tow as a figure that provides alternative worlds from which some escape can be had be an audience.
A poet’s political views will more likely turn up in his prose, but even here Mr. Heaney is wary. That very wariness was the subject of a series of public lectures he gave between 1989 and 1994 as the Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Ten of those fifteen lectures have now been gathered in “The Redress of Poetry,” and the result is a meditation on the uses of art and power, a fresh and astute defense of poetry against any attempt to reduce it to a relevant or useful commodity. Poets from Sir Philip Sidney to Percy Bysshe Shelley to Wallace Stevens have all written impassioned, stirring defenses of their art. In its more reasoned, subtle and amiable way, Mr. Heaney’s new book takes an honored place with theirs.
Poetry is not printout, never merely a fading duplicate of experience. Instead, the book’s title essay insists, a poem is the imagined alternative: “If our given experience is a labyrinth, its impassability can still be countered by the poet’s imagining some equivalent of the labyrinth and presenting himself and us with a vivid experience of it.” And reading, then, is a fable about crossing from one dimension of reality to another. Poetry’s counterreality, furthermore, is meant to complicate experience rather than simplify it, to distort in order to reveal. Grotesque or ecstatic, its excess is meant to balance “life’s inadequacies, desolations and atrocities” without being expected to assume ethical obligations or political motives. Mr. Heaney’s first principle is pleasure. After all, “no honest reader of poems . . . would see moral improvement or, for that matter, political education, as the end and purpose of his or her absorption in a poetic text.” The pleasure we take in poems — even our guilty pleasure in poems written by a talented “oppressor” — comes from their sensuous bravura, from their ability to include what Rilke once called “the side of life that is turned away from us,” and finally from their instinct to transform the circumstances and conditions of life.
An exemplary reading of Christopher Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander,” which was written in the late 1580’s, makes his point convincingly. Mr. Heaney first read the poem as a student at Queen’s University in Belfast, and even then could see it as an example of nascent English imperialism: “This English pentameter marched in step with the invading English armies of the late Tudor period.” However he may have winced at the implication, he thrilled to the lines, and he began to see how Marlowe’s mind worked: “a mind that knows both the penalties of life and its invitations, one closer to the spirit of carnival than to the shock tactics of agitprop.” Marlowe’s gorgeous poem of doomed love is, at its grandest, a parable about the motion of the soul, a motion toward liberation and beatitude but “countered by an implicit acknowledgment of repression and constraint.” Its artistic virtuosity, in other words, is at once undercut and heightened by its psychological realism.
In his “Defense of Poesy,” Sir Philip Sidney linked the creative act of the poet with the pursuit of virtue, “since our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it.” There is, of course, something too simple . . . about that account of the matter. . . . There’s more phenomenological accuracy in John Keats’s notion that poetry surprises by a fine excess, although it’s worth remembering that by “excess” Keats did not mean just a sensuous overabundance of description. What he also had in mind was a general gift for outstripping the reader’s expectation, an inventiveness that cannot settle for the conventional notion that enough is enough, but always wants to extend the alphabet of emotional and technical expression. Even a poem as tonally somber as, say, “Tintern Abbey” is doing something surprising and excessive, getting further back and deeper in than the poet knew it would, the poet being nevertheless still ready to go with it. . . . At these moments there is always a kind of homeopathic benefit for the reader in experiencing the shifts and extensions which constitute the life of a poem. An exuberant rhythm, a display of metrical virtuosity, some rising intellectual ground successfully mounted — experiencing things like these gratifies and furthers the range of the mind’s and the body’s pleasures, and helps the reader to obey the old command: nosce teipsum. Know thyself.
Redress of Poetry display much of the intellectual restlessness, linguistic wizardry and political conscience that have shaped Heaney’s own poetry. His thesis is that poetry of the highest order must redress social imbalances, at once transfiguring the circumstances it observes and offering an unforeseen, more humane, aesthetic alternative. This is an abstract and rigorous idea, yet nonacademic readers will find much to savor as Heaney tests and refines his paradigm in light of a largely canonical selection of poets (most are from the British Isles). Ranging freely from a brief life of each poet to a close reading of a few poems by him or her, he addresses, for instance, how Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” assuages the “loss” to which it alludes; how Christopher Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander” “extended the alphabet” of Elizabethan sexual mores; and how 19th-century rustic poet John Clare achieved a truly lyrical local idiom at odds with official English. With their palpable evocation of the writing process and their disavowal of jargon and trendy political abstractions, these are exemplary essays?and tell us much about the influences and obsessions of this year’s Nobel laureate in literature.
By “redress” Heaney means the preferred definition of compensation for a wrong, but he also intends the obsolete meaning of bringing hunting dogs back to the chase, since poetry is a game of “fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness,” one in which a force “unhindered, yet directed, can sweep ahead into its full potential.” Eminently readable, the various essays here are united by a personal yet profound tone. They explore a broad range of poets, from Christopher Marlowe and John Clare to W.B. Yeats and Elizabeth Bishop, but Heaney’s focus is on poetry’s ability to redress “all of life’s inadequacies, desolations, and atrocities,” not by means of direct political response but simply by being its own intrinsic reward. For all literary collections.
Heaney’s sonorous lyricism stems from his love of the cycles of country life, the mystery of the sea, the satisfying rhythm of hard, physical work. But Heaney loves poetry and poetics as well as nature and expresses this passion in his forceful if demanding literary essays. Heaney explains how poetry balances the “scales of reality towards some transcendent equilibrium.” After considering all the burdens contemporary poets carry, from the long tradition of the form itself to pressing political perspectives, Heaney still insists that “poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delivery.

#University_Of_Sargodha👇#Past_Papers#Prose👇

#University_Of_Sargodha
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#Past_Papers
#Prose
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#Bacon's_Essays
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What evidence of astute expediency do you fined in Bacon's essays?? (2012)
With the help of Bacon's essays can you provemat truth of the statement that "no more keen observer of life and affairs than Bacon ever lived. (2013)
Bacon made remarkable contributions to the development of English Prose. Discuss some qualities of this style in this regard. (2014)
Comment on line " Brightest and meanest of mankind??? (2015)
Bacon's essays reflect his deep understanding of human nature and ripe experience of life. Discuss (2016)
#Gullivers_Travels
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Trace the development of Gulliver's outlook amd mentality in the course if hus voyage.would you regard it and healthy and welcome development ??? (2012) 
I do not hate mankind but proncipally i hate and detest that animal called man" is it possible to reconcile these contradictory remarks og Swift with reference to Gulliver's travels? (2013)  
What were the causes of Swift misanthrope?? Was ge responsible for these causes?? (2014)
How swift satire is destructive in approach and constructive in nature? (2015)
Gulliver venerates the houyhnhnms and describes their culture in glowing terms. Why does he find it so appealing? Do you share Gulliver's admiration of the houyhnhnmns ? (2016)
Compare and contrast the prose style of Bacon & Swift? (2016)
#Unpopular_Essays
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Russells prose style? (2012)
" As to happiness i am not so sure" bring out the significance of this reservation of Russel about ideas that helped mankind. (2013)
What future does Russell visualize for mankind as expressed in his essay " Future of mankind ? (2014)
Russells prose is characterized by clarity intellectual brilliance and catholocity of temper" (2015)
#An_Introduction_to_Culture_And_Imperialism
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Discuss Edward said's Views on "" American imperator" (2012)
Evaluate Edwards said view a Cub are and imperialism and discuss their merits and demerits? (2013)
How can culture integrity maintained according to Edward said? (2014)
What is culture and what is imperialism and how does Edward said relate the two? (2015)
#Eminent_Victorian
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Give a critical estimate if Florence Nightingale " by Lytton Strachy (2013)
End of General Gordon" is the history of nation weary of War.Explain in the light of End of general Gordon ?? (2014)