Course & Code: Romantic Age
Give a critique of Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry
A Defence of Poetry is an essay by the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, written in 1821 and first published posthumously in 1840 in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments (1840) [1839]. It contains Shelley's famous claim that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world".
It was written in response to his friend Thomas Love Peacock's article The Four Ages of Poetry which had been published in 1820. Shelley wrote to the publishers Charles and James Ollier (who were also his own publishers):
In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley argued that the invention of language reveals a human impulse to reproduce the rhythmic and ordered, so that harmony and unity are delighted in wherever they are found and incorporated, instinctively, into creative activities: ‘Every man in the infancy of art, observes an order which approximates more or less closely to that from which highest delight results...’ This ‘faculty of approximation’ enables the observer to experience the beautiful, by establishing a ‘relation between the highest pleasure and its causes’. Those who possess this faculty ‘in excess are poets’ and their task is to communicate the ‘pleasure’ of their experiences to the community. Shelley does not claim language is poetry on the grounds that language is the medium of poetry; rather he recognizes in the creation of language an adherence to the poetic precepts of order, harmony, unity, and a desire to express delight in the beautiful. Aesthetic admiration of ‘the true and the beautiful’ is provided with an important social aspect which extends beyond,
A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others. The pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.Shelley's "Defence" is a response to Thomas Love Peacock's essay, "Four Ages of Poetry," in which Peacock satirically devalued the importance of poetry in the age of science and technology. Shelley believed that poetry--and, by extension, art in general--revealed the beauty and order of things in the universe, and that without the artist's imagination, mankind would fail to appreciate "the small things" in life. He also offered up his essay to fellow poets as a sort of validation, meaning, whatever "slings and arrows" they may suffer is not in vain, that their efforts actually mean something.
Thus "A Defense of Poetry" is a systematic argument designed to differentiate between the origins of poetry and prose writing. The portion of the prose work that is addressed in this paper outlines Shelley's beliefs on how poetry reveals, transforms, and influences human thought.
Course & Code: Victorian Age
Attempt a critical appreciation of the novel hard times by Charles Dickens.
Hard Times - For These Times (commonly known as Hard Times) is the tenth novel by Charles Dickens, first published in 1854. The book appraises English society and is aimed at highlighting the social and economic pressures of the times. The novel is unusual in that it did not contain illustrations; nor is it set in or around London (both usual in Dickens's novels). Instead the story is set in the fictitious Victorian industrial Coketown, a generic Northern English mill-town, not unlike Manchester, partially based upon 19th-century Preston.
Dickens's reasons for writing Hard Times were mostly monetary. Sales of his weekly periodical, Household Words, were low, and he hoped the inclusion of this novel in instalments would increase sales. Since publication it has received a mixed response from a diverse range of critics, such as F.R. Leavis, George Bernard Shaw, and Thomas Macaulay, mainly focusing on Dickens's treatment of trade unions and his post-Industrial Revolution pessimism regarding the divide between capitalistic mill owners and undervalued workers during the Victorian era.
In Hard Times, Charles Dickens gives us a close-up look into what appears to be the ivory tower of the bourgeoisie of his day, yet these middle-class characters are viewed from a singular perspective, the perspective of those at the bottom of the social and economic system. Though Dickens’ characters tend to be well developed and presented with a thoroughly human quality, the stereotypical figure of arrogant and demanding Bounderby fails to accurately capture the motivations and attitudes of the typical successful businessman of the day and is an indication of the author’s political motives. Hard Times, rather than presenting a historically accurate picture of the extraordinary changes brought about by the industrial revolution, is a one-sided attack on the utilitarian value system of the middle 19th century based upon emotional blue-collar appeals for labor sympathy that are not uncommon in today’s corporate environment.
Charles Dickens is one of the most popular and beloved writers who ever lived. His novels and tales catered to a vast and intensely loyal audience. More than just an entertainer, Dickens used his enormous popularity to attack injustice and strengthen the sympathies of his readers for the poor and the helpless, for orphans and outcast persons.
Dickens’ father was eventually released and Dickens resumed his schooling. For the proud, sensitive boy, who had dreamed of becoming a distinguished gentleman, the whole experience had been a terrible, humiliating, lonely ordeal. It profoundly affected him, haunted his writing (most notably in the autobiographical David Copperfield), and colored his view of the world.
Dickens often spoke out on public affairs and became involved with a variety of causes such as prison reform and the abolition of the death penalty. In 1842 he visited America, and although sympathetic to the young republic, was forthright in criticizing its failings, particularly the evil of slavery. In England he lent his active support to a variety of philanthropic endeavors. The problem of the education of the poor, and of children particularly, engaged his attention. Along with its focus on the evils of the industrial system, education is a major theme of Hard Times.
Hard Times sold well, significantly boosting the circulation of the weekly magazine (founded and edited by Dickens himself), in which it first appeared. The critical reception was mixed. Dickens’ accounts of industrial life and his satirical treatment of political economists were attacked by critics with a stake in the debate; the popular journalist and adherent of laissez-faire economics Harriet Martineau, for example, found it “unlike life…master and man are as unlike life in England, at present, as Ogre and Tom Thumb.” But John Ruskin, the great Victorian art critic and sage, thought Hard Times the greatest of Dickens’ works, and wrote that it “should be studied with close and earnest care by persons interested in social questions.” Nearer to our own time, figures as different as George Bernard Shaw and Sigmund Freud have testified to its power. In his book The Great Tradition, the influential English critic F. R. Leavis asserted that Hard Times is “a masterpiece,” which (according to Leavis) unlike any of his other novels has the strength of a “completely serious work of art.”
Toward the end of his life, Dickens threw himself into a series of highly dramatic public readings of his works. While remunerative, these were emotionally draining and contributed to his declining health. He died in 1870. Universally mourned, he was buried in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey.
Hard Times Summary
Thomas Gradgrind, a citizen of the northern industrial town of Coketown, is a convinced Utilitarian: an enemy to Fancy and a worshiper of Fact. He is intent on having the pupils in his model school—who include his children, Tom and Louisa—crammed so full of knowledge as to leave no room for anything else.
Two other pupils of Gradgrind’s prove important to the story: the naturally affectionate Sissy Jupe, the daughter of a performer in Sleary’s Circus (a traveling troupe of clowns, jugglers, and horseback riders), and Bitzer, an emotionless, eerily pale boy who absorbs all of Gradgrind’s precepts. When Sissy’s father abandons her, Gradgrind takes her into his household, making her a companion to his ailing wife. Sissy turns out to be a faithful friend to Louisa and Tom; the calculating, cold-hearted Bitzer, her opposite, turns on his old mentor in the end.
When she comes of age, Louisa marries her father’s friend and ally Josiah Bounderby, a boastful, bullying Coketown manufacturer and banker, who claims, untruthfully, to be an entirely self-made man, abandoned by his mother at an early age and reared in the street. Louisa marries Bounderby despite their difference in age (he is some 30 years her senior) and not loving him in the slightest. She takes this Thomas Gradgrind, a citizen of the northern industrial town of Coketown, is a convinced Utilitarian: an enemy to Fancy and a worshiper of Fact. He is intent on having the pupils in his model school—who include his children, Tom and Louisa—crammed so full of knowledge as to leave no room for anything else.
Two other pupils of Gradgrind’s prove important to the story: the naturally affectionate Sissy Jupe, the daughter of a performer in Sleary’s Circus (a traveling troupe of clowns, jugglers, and horseback riders), and Bitzer, an emotionless, eerily pale boy who absorbs all..
Course & Code: Modern English Literature
Discuss the various types of drama of the twentieth century
The early twentieth century denoted the split between 'frocks and frills' drama and serious works, following in the footsteps of many other European countries. "In Britain the impact of these continental innovations was delayed by a conservative theatre establishment until the late 1950s and 1960s when they converged with the counter-cultural revolution to transform the nature of English language theatre." (Greenblatt 1844) Musical comedies and well-made plays were still a part of the repertoire, but the new direction was political, satirical, and rebellious. Common themes in the new early 20th Century drama were political, reflecting the unease or rebellion of the workers against the state. They explored common societal business practices (conditions of factories), new political ideologies (socialism), or the rise of a repressed sector of the population (women).(Chothia)
Types of Modern Drama
Realism
Realism, in theater, was meant to be a direct observation of human behavior. It began as a way to make theater more useful to society, a way to hold a mirror up to society. Because of this thrust towards the "real" playwrights started using more contemporary settings, backgrounds and characters. Where plays in the past had, for the most part, used mythological or stereotypical characters, now they involved the lower class, the poor, the rich; they involved all genders, classes and races. One of the main contributors to this style was Henrik Ibsen.
Social Realism
Social Realism began showing up in plays during the 1930s. This realism had a political conscience behind it because the world was in a depression. These plays painted a harsh picture of rural poverty. The drama began to aim at showing governments the penalties of unrestrained capitalism and the depressions that lax economies created. One of the main contributors to this style was G.B. Shaw.
Symbolism, Surrealism, and Expressionism
avant garde theatre - imagism, cubism, vorticism, futurism, symbolism, surrealism, Dada dramatic truth couldn't be found in the tangibleness of realistic drama, but in symbols, images, legends, myths, fantasies, dreams (Klaus)
Epic Theatre
Epic theater was created by Bertold Brecht who rejected realistic theatre. He found that such plays were too picture-perfect. Epic Theatre is based off of Greek Epic poetry. There are dramatic illusions such as "stark, harsh lighting, blank stages, placards announcing changes of scenes, bands playing music onstage, and long, discomfiting pauses" (Jacobus). Brecht believed that drama should be made within its audiences and he thought that Epic Theatre drama would reinforce the realities that people were facing rather than challenge them. Epic Theatre helped to preserve the social issues that they portrayed.
Absurdist Drama
Absurdist Drama, existentialist theatre which puts a direct perception of a mode of being above all abstract considerations; it is also essentially a poetic, a lyrical theatre, for the expression of intuitions of being is the field for lyrical poetry. poetry of situation, movement, & concrete imagery, not one of language last page, (Barnet)
Theatre of Cruelty
Theatre of Cruelty was motivated by an idea of Antonin Artaud. It argues the idea that theatre is a "representational medium." Theatre of Cruelty tries to bring current ideas and experiences to the audience through participation and "ritualistic theater experiments." Artaud thought that theatre should show presentation and representation equally. This type of theatre relies deeply on metaphors and rarely included a description of how it could be performed.
Drama was introduced to England from Europe by the Romans, and auditoriums were constructed across the country for this purpose. By the medieval period, the mummers' plays had developed, a form of early street theatre associated with the Morris dance, concentrating on themes such as Saint George and the Dragon and Robin Hood. These were folk tales re-telling old stories, and the actors travelled from town to town performing these for their audiences in return for money and hospitality. The medieval mystery plays and morality plays, which dealt with Christian themes, were performed at religious festivals.
Some of the important developments in modern drama are expressionism, epic theatre, symbolism, surrealism, and the theater of the absurd.
1. Expressionism: Expressionism in drama was concentrated in Germany in the early 20th century. Friedrich Carl Georg Kaiser (1878-1945) was the most famous expressionist dramatist. His popular plays include "From Morn to Midnight" and "The Burghers of Calais." The main feature of expressionism is a distortion of physical reality to highlight certain emotional effects and convey personal moods and feelings.
2. Epic Theater: The chief proponent and successful practitioner of this form of modern drama was the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956). Its main feature was the use of the ancient epic convention of choruses and projections as a means of commentary. "Mother Courage"(1939) is Brecht's most famous play.
3.Symbolism: The aim of symbolism was to capture absolute truth by indirect methods. Symbolism emphasized mysticism, and the life of dreams and fantasies. The most famous symbolist theater person was Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard, Count Maeterlinck (1862-1949). His most famous play is "The Blue Bird" (1908).
4. Surrealism: Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, (1880-1918) is the foremost surrealist playwright and his most successful play is 'The Breasts of Tiresias' (1903,1917). Surrealism's main is to reveal the dynamics of the sub conscious and is characterized by fantastic imagery and juxtaposition of bizarre subject matter.
5. Theater of the Absurd: As the word 'absurd' indicates the dramas of the "Absurd" reveal the meaninglessness of modern life and depict man as a puppet controlled by some bizarre external force. Some of the important playwrights of this type of drama are Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" (1948,1953) is one of most important plays of the twentieth century.
Course & Code: Phonetics and spoken English
Describe the consonant and vowel phonemes of English Language.
a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are [p], pronounced with the lips; [t], pronounced with the front of the tongue; [k], pronounced with the back of the tongue; [h], pronounced in the throat; [f] and [s], pronounced by forcing air through a narrow channel (fricatives); and [m] and [n], which have air flowing through the nose (nasals). Contrasting with consonants are vowels.
Consonants and vowels correspond to distinct parts of a syllable. All the letters in the alphabet are either consonants or vowels. A consonant is a speech sound in which the breath is at least partly obstructed, and any letter which represents this.[1] Consonants may come singly or in clusters, but must be connected to a vowel to form a syllable.
Consonants have friction when they are spoken, mostly using the position of the tongue against the lips, teeth and roof of the mouth. b and p are plosives, using the lips to produce a tiny sharp sound. Phonetics texts give more details, with diagrams. Consonants may be voiced[2] or unvoiced.[3] The th in the is voiced, but in breath is not.
There are 21 consonant letters in English, for 24 consonant sounds in most English accents.[4]p242 Because of the history of the English language, there is no neat on-to-one relationship between letter and sound. th and ch each stand for a single sound, and x in fox stands for two sounds (ks). All these letters are consonants:
B, C, D, F, G, H, J, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, V, W, X, (sometimes Y), and Z. "Y" is often used as a consonant, but it is sometimes used as a vowel. For example, in the word yellow, y is a consonant. But in the word happy, y is a vowel.
The rest of the letters of the alphabet are called vowels. Vowels are underdone, for there are about 20 vowel sounds in most English accents.[4]p237 The vowels are:
A, E, I, O, U (and sometimes Y) In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! [ɑː] or oh! [oʊ], pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! [ʃː], where there is a constriction or closure at some point along the vocal tract. A vowel is also understood to be syllabic: an equivalent open but non-syllabic sound is called a semivowel.
Phoneme - A small unit of sound relating to the phonic approach to reading. The smallest unit of sound that a child learns and sounds out within a word. There are 44 phonemes.
Course & Code: Communication Skills
Define listening skills and explain how it facilitates communication
(1) Just decide to listen.
(2) Start with a deep breath to calm and focus yourself.
(3) You listen where you are looking. Your eyes lead the way and tend to make you focus.
(4) Listen for the motivation or feelings going on behind the words. Be sure to remember that when people talk, less than 10% of the meaning is conveyed by words.
Words convey a message. The tone conveys the true meaning or a greater meaning. At least 35% of meaning is given by the tone and over 50% is conveyed by body language. The trap is being caught up in the words (the 10%) and missing the meaning of a message of which is conveyed non-verbally. Also be absolutely aware that at this point in time, most people are not only rationally illiterate, they are profoundly so! Only when you ask “the meanings” of a random selection of any of the words they had just spoken, would they realize they either do not know, or had a vague assumption; nor would they recognize any rational terms used; know what “a rational term is,” much less “the factor value” of any of the critical ten or less key rational terms.
(5) Make it easy for the other side by giving them your full attention. Attention is your most powerful emotional signal to the other side.
(6) Be aware of gender, as conversation is like a dance, and men like to lead. Men tend to be posturing, up or down, in relation to you and their conversations tend to be negotiations for status levels and somewhat toward who has the upper hand.
Women are more to seeing themselves as part of a network of connections and their conversations are often objective negotiations for closeness or support with their attitude more towards creating relationships.
(7) Your emotional attitudes, prejudices, memories of similar conversations, and past experiences are forever between you and your rational mind. The greatest enemy to you holding the supreme position, which is rational listening, is the human species' emotional knee-jerk reactions.
To keep a relationship healthy, there has to be good communication. It doesn't matter if the relationship is with an intimate, casual or business partner. The best way to be a great communicator is to be a really good listener. This makes people feel respected as well as understood.
Identification
Listening skills are essential in the workplace, the family and the community at large. Careers in communications, management, planning, sales, and fund raising, to name a few, rely on good listening skills. Listening, however, is more than just being able to hear and understand what someone else says. Listening skills involve etiquette, asking for clarification, showing empathy and providing an appropriate response.
Body Language
Good listening skills include using body language that empowers the speaker. You should make eye contact with the speaker. In a large auditorium or in a classroom, this means keeping your eyes looking at the speaker, not down or gazing at some daydream. Keep your hands down, not folded across your chest. Sit up and look alert.
Respect
People who have good listening skills show respect to the speaker by not interrupting him while he is talking. Even if the speaker stutters or is slow to speak or select his words, being patient and restraining yourself from finishing his sentences is a mark of a good listener.
Comprehension
Good listening skills depend on good comprehension. Demonstrate that you understand by restating what you think you have heard. Then ask if you, in fact, did hear correctly. Ask questions that request specific clarification on points that you are unsure about. Be cognizant of the length of time that you speak, making sure not to dominate or usurp the conversation.
Response
Good listening skills are measured by the response of the listener. First, the response should validate the speaker with etiquette and empathy. Next, it should show that the listener understands the message. When the message has been adequately delivered and received, the result should be an action or statement that demonstrates that there has been a transaction between the speaker and the listener.
Effective listening is almost certainly the most important communication skill, and essential to anyone serious about Self Improvement and Success.
Some people envy those who have the 'gift of the gab' and always seem to be the centre of attention. However, this does not mean that good talkers are good communicators; in fact they are often just the opposite.
When engaged in conversation, it is very easy to pay little attention to what the other person is actually saying. We can become easily distracted by countless other thoughts and things happening around us, or thinking about what we are going to say next.
Like most skills, we can learn to communicate and listen better if we really want to, and there are many Communication Experts available who can help. Despite what many people may think, good communication is not all about concentrating on getting across our own points of view and opinions. It has been said that we were given two ears and one mouth for good reason, and that when interacting with other people, we should spend at least twice as much time listening as we do talking.
The most basic - and important - communication skills are the ability to listen impartially, to try to absorb the essence of what the other person is saying, and to really understand their point of view. These are the skills that will make us better communicators, better friends and partners, and certainly help our overall happiness and success.
Listening skills have not been given much importance like other aspects of communication skills, but it is true that listening skills play a major role in the success of one's communication skills. Only a good listener can be a good speaker.
