ELSA Online Meet - ‘My Favourite Literary Critic’
Sunday December 27, 2020
Always up for
interpretation, a hundred different things to a hundred different people, a
stuff which is never the same thing twice, is what makes literature always a
fascination and especially open to criticism as well. With this in view, the
theme of Elsa Meet held on Sunday, December 27, 2020 was ‘My Favourite Literary Critic’. Indeed, literary theory and
literary criticism, are the terms often used together to describe the same
concept. In fact a very basic way of thinking about literary theory is that these
ideas act as different lenses critics use
to view and talk about art, literature,
and even culture.
With his usual introductory remarks Prof. Ghosh shared his observations regarding literary Criticism based on his experience as a scholar, writer, critic, and a teacher. He quoted Samuel Johnson “I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.” He cited John Osborne’s statement, “Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs" to elaborate the role and significance of criticism in literature from the perspective of a general reader as well as a scholar and prepared the ground for further discussion to build on to.
Mr. Saurabh Agarwal, who was our first speaker made his presentation on the topic ‘Understanding Canonical Literature with Harold Bloom’. Our next speaker Dr. Chanda Singh contemplated on Mathew Arnold and his Innovative Ideas highlighting Arnold’s idea of criticism as “a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world, thus to establish a current of fresh and true ideas.” Challenging the conventional notions of gender and emphasizing the theory of gender performativity, Dr. Manju Rani deliberated on the topic ‘Judith Butler's Gender Fluidity and its Reflection in Indian Myths’. In her discussion she brought to light how queerness went behind the curtains only to re-emerge in front of a more complicated, confused and probably a more rigid audience. Following her, Dr. Pramila Chawla made her presentation on George Orwell as a literary critic with special reference to his essay, ‘Why I Write’ sharing Orwell’s autobiographical journey and influences and motivations that were behind his career as an author and a critic. While Dr. Anju Verma presented her views on ‘Tony Tanner’s “Introduction” to Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park’, Dr. Tanya Mander discussed literary criticism from the lens of Michel Foucault whose historical work now forms part of the everyday language of criticism and analysis. Dr. Seema Sinha introspected on the topic ‘L’ecriture Feminine: Female Voices in The Mahabharata, drawing upon the diversity, fluidity and multiple possibilities inherent in the character of Draupadi apart from what has been largely assumed by society. She also elaborated on the contradictions that existed in Bible, Manusmriti, Adiparva, Mahabharata in relation to the status of women and the feminine principle. Dr. Anindya Polley expressed his views on Simone de Beauvoir and her contribution to the Feminist Movement. Dr. Santosh Gupta along with Dr. Ashok Bandla, Mr. Prem Chawla, Dr. Roopali Khanna, Dr. Nityanand Pattanayak, Dr. Rajan Lal and Mr. Shravan Kumar made their presence felt with interesting comments and observations.
Prof. Ghosh concluded the meeting by
summing up the content of the various deliberations. He highlighted how
Literary Theory had encroached upon the region of Literary Criticism especially
in modern times to dislodge the interest that a reader or scholar had in
connecting pertinently with the text in the classroom and elsewhere. He warned
against the attendant danger of imposing theoretical constructs on the text in
the name of research leading nowhere. His Editorial in the March 2006 issue of Re-Markings
is reproduced below as an instance of his observation.
What Price Literary Theory
Nibir K. Ghosh
If peradventure, reader, it has been thy
lot to find yourself trapped in the labyrinths of contemporary academia where
literary knights, armed with the lethal arsenal of literary theories, joust
with each other and confound the bewildered onlooker, you needn’t recede into
the secluded confines of despair or depression. If you have felt intimidated by
men and women talking of Bakhtin, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida et al. in
conference and seminar rooms, or if you have tried in vain to comprehend
critical jargons like poststructuralism, postcolonialism, diasporisation and
postmodernism, all you need to do is learn the secret mantra that can inspire
you to exchange a lance or two with some of these gallant knights. That mantra
is “obscurity.” A firm grounding in obscurity of thought and language can take
you to higher altitudes of career advancement. Remember, posture can be as
important as politics when it comes to the intelligentsia. In other words, it
may be less important whether or not you like postmodernism than whether or not
you can speak and write postmodernism. First and foremost, you must realise the
inefficacy of using plainly expressed language. It sounds too realist,
modernist and obvious. Postmodern language requires the use of play, parody and
indeterminacy as critical techniques to point this out. Often this is quite a
difficult requirement, so obscurity is a well-acknowledged substitute. For
example, let’s imagine you want to say something like, “We should listen to the
views of people outside of Indian society in order to learn about the cultural
biases that affect us.” This is honest but dull and somehow doesn’t fit into
the postmodern paradigm. Instead of the word “views,” you would do well to use
“voices”, or better, “vocalities,” or even better, “multi-vocalities.” Add an
adjective like “intertextual,” and you’re covered. “People outside” is also too
plain. How about “postcolonial others”? To speak postmodern with expertise all
you need is switch gears from plain clarity to complex obscurity so that you
are able to “mediate” your “identities.” Also, don’t hesitate to use as many
suffixes, prefixes, hyphens, slashes, underlinings and anything else you can
think of. In order to make your presentation a grand success, just throw in a
few names whose work everyone will agree is important and hardly anyone has had
the time or the inclination to read. Be careful, don’t you tread on familiar
and indigenous grounds. Adopt the “western” viewpoint, for the terminology used
by European or American theorists are best when you are hunting for difficult
material to navigate your way through postmodern/ postcolonial space.
It is rather ironical that the two World Wars
resulted in killing not only millions of people indiscriminately but also in
maiming and atrophying, by default, the innocent minds of the survivors into
believing that everything – the story, the hero, even God – was dead. The
perpetuation of this myth by intellectuals lost in the darkling groves of
academe led to the negation of the pleasure principle that had hitherto
informed the literature of all climes right from the days of Homer to the
beginning of the 20th century. In spite of the proliferation of literary
theories on a global scale that clouds the understanding of both life and art
today, it is heartening to know that even highly acclaimed obscure writers are
not unaware of the significance of a good story that appeals to the “laws of
our primary nature” and is free from the imposition of all labels and
signifiers like colonial, postmodern or postcolonial. As a case in point, I
would like to recall a passage from Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things:
The secret of the Great
Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have
heard and want to hear again. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick
endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the
house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end,
yet you listen as though you don’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives,
who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.
After such knowledge, what
forgiveness! –
EDITORIAL,
Nibir K. Ghosh (Chief Editor)
Re-Markings Vol. 5 No. 1, March
2006. pp.3-4.
Mathew Arnold’s Ideal Critic
Chanda Singh
Mathew Arnold’s essay, “The Function of Criticism at
the Present Time,” was published in “Essays in Criticism in 1865.” In this
essay Arnold points to the function of the good critic: to educate himself so
that he is able to not only identify and elevate literature that possesses ‘High
Truth and High Seriousness’ in a disinterested manner, but, also, is able to
create a ‘Current of Fresh Ideas’.
There was at the time great inclination towards provincialism
in English Literature, something Arnold did not approve of. He stressed,
therefore, the need for “disinterested” evaluation of any literary writing. Intelligent
criticism, for Arnold, meant seeing the object as the object in itself really was.
He insisted, therefore, that the critic must learn and
understand the best that is to know in order to be a good, unbiased,
disinterested critic. He must not only make the best ideas prevail, but, also,
introduce a current of fresh ideas to nourish the creative powers. He must till
the soil to preserve what is best in a world that was already becoming
nightmarish, verities receding. The lofty task of the responsible critic, according to Arnold, was to promote “a current of ideas in
the highest degree animating and nourishing to the creative power.” Alarmed at
what he termed Philistinism Arnold stated in no uncertain terms that it had no
place in a civilized world. Arnold’s critic, thus, has an obligation to both
society and the artist: stimulate the critic’s mind, find the best that is
written, and make it known to the reader.
To prevent fallacies of judgement on the part of the
critic Arnold also advocated the “Touchstone Method” as Longnius had done
centuries ago. Arnold believes that all great writing possesses Seriousness and
Truth. He holds that this can be the touchstone to judge other works, old and
new.
Although the method of comparative criticism (Touchstone)
as suggested by Arnold was not accepted widely because many thought the
comparison of a work with quotes from works of established worth was arbitrary.
Arnold held centre- stage as a critic for long, for clearly defining great
literature, and for his insistence on
the need for the creation of a current of fresh ideas by the critic : an idea widely
accepted and admired. He was, as R.A. Scott James in The Making of
Literature” says, a” critic with a duty to society” (p. 263).
Dr. Chanda Singh, RBS College, Agra
Foucault: The Axis
of Power and Knowledge
Tanya Mander
Michel Foucault was a French historian and a philosopher, closely associated with Structuralists and Post-Structuralist movement. His works are read both as philosophical, and as critical of certain ideas as presented in traditional philosophy. Foucault inverted Kant’s idea of deciphering philosophy in terms of critiquing the knowledge templates: The contingent truths of human cognition may be necessary underlying truths; Foucault challenges the idea by posing that what may be experienced as necessary could be contingent. For Foucault most of ‘understanding’ of human nature is the product of ‘contingent historical forces’; thereby challenging the normative understanding of ‘truths’. Foucault, has shaped and shifted the perspective on power: ‘power is everywhere’ and ‘is embodied in discourse and knowledge’. The paradigm that viewed power in terms of coercion, domination or even episodic was subverted to power being pervasive and discursive. He coined new terms such as ‘metapower’ or ‘regimes of truth’ and ‘power/knowledge’ to explain that power is wielded through established forms of knowledge, science, discourse and ‘truth’. Foucault successfully offered an understanding where power could be seen as an everyday phenomenon, socialized and accepted as mundane and ordinary. Foucault’s ideas have been criticized for not identifying a structure or an agent, which leaves no space for resistance and action.
However, Foucault believed in the role and work of an intellectual; he himself was a political and social analyst. According to him, the role of the intellectual was to interrupt the discourse and knowledge with the aim to ‘evade, subvert and contest strategies of power’; to recognize and challenge power was to ‘detach’ it from normative truths and forms of hegemony; truth is informed by ‘disunity’ and ‘resistance’ to a normative order; an intellectual must offer a counter perspective to destabilize and undo established ‘historical continuities’; he calls it the ‘the principle of discontinuity’. It becomes imperative to engage with different discourses, and the mechanisms through which they operate. Foucault believed that every society has its ‘regimes of truth’, which essentially points to the discourse that is accepted and sanctioned. The truth is continuously being reinforced through popular images in media; through ideologies and through systems of education; but he also believes that power and discourse create reality, and rituals of truth.
To read Foucault is to recognize ‘invisible power’ and to view discourse both as tool and effect of power.
Dr. Tanya Mander, RGNU, Patiala
Understanding
Canonical Literature with Harold Bloom
Saurabh Agarwal
The choice of my favourite critic is influenced by the selection of my reading in general, which inadvertently aligns itself with the canonical literature as suggested by Prof. Harold Bloom, a great teacher and a monstrous reader who was known to read a four hundred page book in an hour. His work The Western Canon is primarily an effort to narrow down the endless list of suggested read to sixty-three great works. Bloom says, “Who reads must choose, since there is literally not enough time to read everything, even if one does nothing but read.” The method of selection of the canon is based on the aesthetic value that “can be recognized or experienced, but it cannot be conveyed to those who are incapable of grasping its sensations and perceptions.”
Bloom makes Shakespeare the centre of this canon for "we owe to Shakespeare not only our representation of cognition but much of our capacity for cognition. The difference between Shakespeare and his nearest rivals is one of both kind and degree, and that double difference defines the reality and necessity of the Canon". According to Bloom, it is the invention of characters like Flastaff among so many others that Shakespeare remains unsurpassable. Dante’s Beatrice, Milton’s Satan and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath are the best of the characters ever created, thus it includes them in The Western Canon. Another distinguishing feature of the canon is that these works are marked by their originality which manifests itself as “strangeness” to us.
Bloom lays down a clear literary road map which helps them navigate the desultory readers and for scholars alike. "All that the Western Canon can bring one," he says "is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality". The Western Canon has several detractors who talk of it being dominated by “Dead, White, Male”. Also, critics find it difficult not to consider literature as Socio-Political document. Despite all disagreements, Bloom’s Canons of literature remain unsurpassed and will continue to define the standards of good literature for ages to come.
Saurabh Agarwal, Entrepreneur and Writer
Judith
Butler’s fluidity of gender and its reflection in Indian Myths
Manju
Judith Butler, one of the most important theorists, has the same place
in gender theory as the Bible has in Christianity. She explores numerous issues
related to gender theory. Fluidity of gender is so relevant that it was and still
has been a popular area for various researchers for exploring its new facets. For most of the people sex and gender roles
are determined biologically. Therefore, biological genital of a person decides
how a person will behave in the society. Judith Butler rejects this idea
through the revolutionary concept of fluidity of gender which says that gender is
a social construction. According to her anyone can be a male and female
indifferent to his biological sex. Interestingly Indian epics are found supporting
Judith Butler when a close reading of famous Indian epics is made. Lord Shiva
who is known for his manhood as the phallus of the deity is also known for his
half-woman form. According to Shivpurana, a religious book, the deity
comes on the earth in the feminine form multiple times, like once he comes as a
midwife to help one of his devotee and as a gopi to enjoy Krishna's rasleela
where no other man than Krishna was allowed. Lord Vishnu also appears in feminine
form multiple times as he is famous for his image of Mohini, Gopa Devi and
Achuta. While performing raas in Brindawan, Krishna, the incarnation of Lord
Vishnu, is surrounded with women and dances with them. Ironically it happens in
the same society where dancing men are mocked at. Ardhhnarishwar is admired but
third genders are abominated. Thus the society where crossing the boundaries of
gender mean bitter criticism and humiliation needs to reanalyze the great
books which the people respect but do not understand.
Dr Manju, UILAH, Chandigarh University
Redefining English Literary Criticism: Samuel Johnson as
My Favourite Literary Critic
Anjali Singh
“Clear your mind of cant.” -- Dr. Samuel Johnson
Encyclopedic in knowledge, Johnson
practiced most forms of literary criticisms. As an empirical critic, he
stressed the danger of rigidity emphasizing truth, nature and reason to be ideally
aligned with the conventions. As a moral critic, he believed literature was
life; writers had a moral duty to elevate goodness and justice over evil.
His Rambler essays echoed the power
of writing marked by a masterful use of language and rhetoric. Quoting him, “My
other works are wine and water; but my Rambler is pure wine.”
Known for his aphorism, his
gift of ‘miniature wisdom’ helped in making a mark for himself with the dictionary
he wrote. The Dictionary was a
first in many ways – etymologies (not his strong point, yet included),
definitions which were most interesting and original, and illustrations usage
with quotations drawn from literature ranging from Elizabethan to his own time.
Owing to his difficult relation with a supposed patron of his, Johnson defined ‘patron’
as “one who countenances,
supports, or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is
paid with flattery.”
In
The Edition of Shakespeare Johnson
defends Shakespeare for defying the classical dramatic unities (place, time and
action); since the audience is aware that the story on the stage is
superficial, these rigid expectations are unimportant; Shakespeare’s portrayals
were about men with flaws and his stories mirrored these mortals and their
lives.
The Lives of the Poets initially conceived as a preface grew into
a voluminous writing. His structuring bespoke that a good poet was not
necessarily a good man, an intent to justify the failings and praise the virtues.
Johnson believed that there are no fixed frames of perceptions; each lens is unique. Surviving his ordeals, he made the best of what life had to offer him. Often not practicing what he preached and vice versa he attempted to balance his needs with his wants. Recognition of this literary genius in the twentieth century brings home the aphorism, “Better late than never!” He truly redefined “English Literature.”
Ms. Anjali Singh, Research Scholar
