Sima's Blog

CULTURE AND ANARCHY MATTHEW ARNOLD Matthew Arnold was born at Laleham on the Thames on Dec. 24, 1822. His father, Dr. Thomas Arnold, one of the worthies whom Lytton Strachey was to portray somewhat critically in  Eminent Victorians,  became the celebrated master of Rugby School, and his ideals of Christian education were influential. As a young man, Matthew Arnold saw something of William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, and other veterans of English romanticism. Educated at Rugby and then at Balliol College, Oxford, he early began to write poetry. The closest friend of his youth was Arthur Hugh Clough, a poet and sometime disciple of Dr. Arnold, whose death Matthew Arnold would later mourn in his elegy "Thyrsis." In 1844 Arnold took a second-class honors degree at Oxford, and the following year he was elected to a fellowship at Oriel College. After some teaching he became private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, who eventually had him appointed to an inspector ship of sch...

Alfred Lord Tennyson Robert Browning Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson were two main Victorian poets. They both were also famous in Dramatic monologue. Both the poets apply new techniques and styles in poetry writing. but both these poets adopt their own styles in their writing. "How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use! As tho’ to breathe were life!" Tennyson was the fourth of 12 children, born into an old Lincolnshire family, his father a rector. Alfred, with two of his brothers, Frederick and Charles, was sent in 1815 to Louth grammar school—where he was unhappy. He left in 1820, but, though home conditions were difficult, his father managed to give him a wide literary education. Alfred was precocious, and before his teens he had composed in the styles of Alexander Pope, Sir Walter Scott, and John Milton. To his youth also belongs The Devil and the Lady (a collection of previously unpublished poems published posth...

DECONSTRUCTION AND DERRIDA Deconstruction is an approach to understand the relationship between text and meaning .It is a method of critical analysis of philosophical and literary language which emphasizes the internal working of language and conceptual systems , the relational quality of meaning meaning and the assumptions implicit in forms of expression. JACQUES DERRIDA was an Anglerian born French philosopher best known for developing form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction . he is one of the major figures associated with post structuralism and post modern philosophy.The term Deconstruction is very hard to define . As Derrida himself denies to define this term by saying that all other terms we use in philosophy or literary criticism even deconstruction can not be once and finally define. "Language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique. "                           ...

THINKING ACTIVITY STRUCTURALISM HELLO READERS,                           Today's blog is about  Structuralism . Structuralism is a  movement of thought in the humanities, widespread in anthropology, linguistics, and literary theory, and influential in the 1950s and ’60s. Based primarily on the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, structuralism considered language as a system of signs and signification, the elements of which are understandable only in relation to each other and to the system. In literary theory, structuralism challenged the belief that a work of literature reflected a given reality; instead, a text was constituted of linguistic conventions and situated among other texts. Structuralist critics analyzed material by examining underlying structures, such as characterization or plot, and attempted to show how these patterns were universal and could thus be used to develop gener...