Sunday Reading : Northrop Frye

RELIGION AND LITERATURE :

(TRANSLATION OF THE PAPER CUTTING ABOVE IN THE IMAGE ) Do not believe in God.  And I think I should see God retire now.  The idea of ​​God is a beautiful concept of a poet.  And it was useful at the beginning of human membership.  But now is the time to face the world with a completely logical approach.  There is no evidence of the existence of God for the last five thousand years.  And faith in events that cannot be scientifically proven is nothing short of superstitious.  There have been many inhuman transactions, atrocities and wars in the name of God.  It is not only our need to reject the notion of God, but also our duty.  Because it is a great injustice against humanity.  Only logical thinking has the ability to put people above everything else.  But when you believe in God, you lose that ability, and blindly accept what is said.  You make your intelligence inactive.  And then there is no difference between you and the beast. (SHARIRAM LAGU)

God  and religion the pious but the most controversial words of the world. In this( two pious so called  words as most of the people say )when we think rationally or logically we find them the most dangerous  words . from ages people fight in the name of god and religion .what is religion?  Religion are made up of myths , why it is necessary  to follow any religion why can't we be atheists ? why we need a god who is supposed to save us from every dangerous situation but never came to save us. Now a days people fights in the name of religion, people became intolerant. Even we go deep in all the religious scriptures it is full of bloodshed. According to Frye there's a close relationship between literary criticism and religion. A literary critic considers God an archetypal man who is portrayed as hero. When we read scriptures of all religions there's just a story of the God. We don't find any specific source about it. There are many versions of Ramayana, valmiki's Ramayana, Tulsidas's Ramayana. 

                       THANK YOU...

CS in paractice : Hamlet and To his coy mistress

=Hamlet through the lens of Cultural Study

This two characters were marginalized in Hamlet , they are even more so in Hamlet , they are even more so in Stoppard's handling . if Shakespeare marginalized the powerless in his own version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern , Stoppard has marginalized us all in an ear - in the eyes of some - all of us are caught up in forces beyond our control.
Rosencranz and Guildernstern are two pawns used by both Hamlet and Claudios. The means of their name are garlend and golden star. They both studied with Hamlet and we can say treated as mere puppets.

To His Coy Mistress :

To His Coy Mistress" is a Cavalier poem written by the English author and politician Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) either during or just before the English Interregnum (1649–60). It was published posthumously in 1681.
This poem is considered one of Marvell's finest and is possibly the best recognized carpe diem poem in English. Although the date of its composition is not known, it may have been written in the early 1650s. At that time, Marvell was serving as a tutor to the daughter of the retired commander of the New Model Army, Sir Thomas Fairfax.
The  poem to his coy mistress tells us a lot about the speaker , the listener and also the audience for whom it is written . But what does the he not show ? as he selects these rich and multifarious allusions , what does he ignore from his culture ?
The speaker of the poem starts by addressing a woman who has been slow to respond to his romantic advances. In the first stanza he describes how he would pay court to her if he were to be unencumbered by the constraints of a normal lifespan. He could spend centuries admiring each part of her body and her resistance to his advances (i.e., coyness) would not discourage him. In the second stanza, he laments how short human life is. Once life is over, the speaker contends, the opportunity to enjoy one another is gone, as no one embraces in death. In the last stanza, the speaker urges the woman to requite his efforts, and argues that in loving one another with passion they will both make the most of the brief time they have to live.
                                 Thank you..
References :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_His_Coy_Mistress

CS in Practice : Frankenstein and Writers Market

FRANKENPHEME IN CONTEMPORARY INDIAN CULTURE :

   
                    Mary Shelly's novel Frankenstein has morphed into countless forms in both highbrow and popular culture , including the visual arts , fiction, and notification , stage plays , film , television, advertising , clothing, jewelry , toys , chains , coffee mugs, games , halloween costumes  comic books , jokes , cartoons ,pornography , academic costumes , fan club , web sites and even food.
        if we look at contemproray indian culure we can find so many things as popular as Mary Shelly's Frankenstein FOR EXAMPLE :

The recent Hindi movie  Kabir Singh :

in current time Hindi movie kabir singh is talk of the town people are crazy about the movie the songs , the dialogues , even the beard  and sunglasses everything is so popular about this movie.even MENSXP has given detailed instructions on how to grow beard like KABIR SINGH CLICK HERE  to view the advertisement .

Factors about the popularity of the movie or Market of the Kabir Singh :

The Story :

Love + sex+ break up + heartbreak + sad songs, drinking , smoking +  Patch up

India has the largest population of youngsters , and among them all this things are comman among young people.

POPULARITY OF KABIR SINGH STYLE :

Songs :
heartbroken songs like Bekhayali, Love songs like Tuje Kitan Chahne Lage hum are most popular among youngsters.

Dialogues :
catchy or one can say cheap dialogues and erotic scenes and drinking and smoking scenes , all this things attracts the young people. this can be also considered as one of the major reason of the popularity of the movie .

Five Types Of Cultural Studies

What is cultural studies?

Cultural Studies is not a tightly coherent unified movement with a fixed agenda, but a loosely coherent group of tendencies, issues, and questions.”

FIVE TYPES OF CULTURAL STUDIES :

BRITISH CULTURAL MATERIALISM :

Cultural materialism emerged as a theoretical movement in the early 1980s along with new historicism, an American approach to early modern literature, with which it shares much common ground. The term was coined by Williams, who used it to describe a theoretical blending of leftist culturalism and Marxist analysis. Cultural materialists deal with specific historical documents and attempt to analyze and recreate the zeitgeist of a particular moment in history.

cultural materialism began in earnest in the 1950s with the work of F. R. Levis which was heavily influenced by Matthew  Arnold's bourgeois culture . Levis sought to use the education system to distribute literary knowledge and appreciation more widely . 

Cultural materialists analyze the processes by which hegemonic forces in society appropriate canonical and historically important texts, such as Shakespeare  and Ayusten, and utilize them in an attempt to validate or inscribe certain values on the cultural Imagenery. Jonathan  Dollimore and Alan  Sinfiled , authors of Political Shakespeare have had considerable influence in the development of this movement and their book is considered to be a seminal text. They have identified four defining characteristics of cultural materialism as a theoretical device:

• Historical context
• Close textual analysis
• Political commitment
• Theoretical method

CONTRIBUTION OF MITCHEL Foucault  in  NEW HISTORIC-ISM :

"power is everywhere because it comes from everywhere"

the simple function of new historic-ism is that it reads the  questions from past through new historic-ism and to do so one has to to go beyond book for the real history.To a considerable extent, Foucault can be seen as one of the guiding spirits behind the school of criticism known as New Historicism. The leading lights of New Historicism such as Stephen Greenblatt consciously sought to challenge prevailing conceptions of textual interpretation by offering up parallel readings of texts grounded in specific socio-historical and cultural conditions.

 HOW CAN NEW HISTORICISM HELP IN ANSWERING THE QUESTION RAISED AGAINST LAPUTA EPISODE IN GULLIVERS TRAVELS ?

                      Laputa is a gigantic trope of the female body : the circular island with a round chasm at the center, through which the astronomers of the island descend to a domelike structure of the “ Fandom Gangue “ or “ astronomer’s cave”. Laputa has at its center a giant lodestone on which the movement of the island depends. The floating physical structure of Laputa is like a uterus and vagina ; Gulliver and the Aleutians’ are able to enter this cavity at will and control not only the movements of the lodestone and island , but also the entire society. As Bruce remarks, “ It is this which engenders the name of the island : in a paradigmatic instance of misogyny, the achievement of male control over female body itself renders that body the whore: Laputa”.

Elaine Showalter and Gayatri Spivak

From Ages women considered as subalterns, weak, evil and so on. They were always controlled by Patriarchy. We know that when you torture someone constantly the person will definitely retaliate and the same thing happened with the subaltern or oppressed women a new turm emerged : Feminism,it is a range of social movements political movements and ideologies that aim to define, establish, and achieve the political, economic, personal, and social equality of sexes. Feminism incorporates the position that societies prioritize the male point of view, and that women are treated unfairly within those societies. Efforts to change that include fighting gender stereotypes and seeking to establish educational and professional opportunities for women that are equal to those for men.

Spark asks whether men or women are in the driver's seat and whether the power to choose one's destroyer is women's only form of self-assertion.”

Showalter explains this female era of the current phase with the term "gynocriticism" and her project has to do with women's autonomy, but particularly regarding what women's writing is and/or can be: 

In contrast to this angry or loving fixation on male literature, the program of gynocritics is to construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather than to adapt male models and theories. Gynocritics begins at the point when we free ourselves from the linear absolutes of male literary history, stop trying to fit women between the lines of the male tradition, and focus instead on the newly visible world of female culture. 

Showalter wants women to go beyond studying and/or deconstructing female stereotypes and to go beyond the ways women have been subjected to secondary status and male systems of thinking. In other words, one of the shifts is to move from speaking of women as victims or as struggling against a male system: to move from this to focusing on women's autonomous experience; not separated from the world of men, but independent from everything. 

Cultural Studies

What is cultural studies?

Cultural Studies is not a tightly coherent unified movement with a fixed agenda, but a loosely coherent group of tendencies, issues, and questions.”

Cultural studies, interdisciplinary field concerned with the role of social institutions in the shaping of culture. Cultural studies emerged in Britain in the late 1950s and subsequently spread internationally, notably to the United States and Australia. Originally identified with the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham (founded 1964) and with such scholars as Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, and Raymond Williams, cultural studies later became a well-established field in many academic institutions, and it has since had broad influence in sociology, anthropology, historiography, literary criticism, philosophy, and art criticism. Among its central concerns are the place of race or ethnicity, class, and gender in the production of cultural knowledge.

Four Goals of Cultural Studies :

Cultural studies is politically engaged :

cultural critics see themselves as Opposition not only within their own disciplines but many of the power structure of society at large. they question inequality within power structure and seek to discover models for restructuring relationships among dominant and minority or subaltern discourses . because meaning and individual subjectivity are culturally constructed ,they can thus reconstructed. such a notion , taken to a philosophical extreme , denies the autonomy of the individual weather an actual  person or character in literature , a rebuttal of the traditional humanistic great man or great book theory and a relocation of aesthetic and culture from the ideal realms of taste and sensibility , into the arena of a whole society 's everyday life as it is constructed .

CULTURAL STUDIES TRANSCENDS THE CONFINES OF A PARTICULAR DISCIPLINE SUCH AS LITERARY CRITICISM OR HISTORY :

 Cultural studies involves scrutinizing the cultural phenomenon of a text- for example;

Italian opera , a Latino novella , the architectural styles of prisons , body piercing and drawing conclusions . Cultural studies is not necessarily about literature in the traditional sense or even bout art. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler emphasizes that, the intellectual promise of cultural studies lies in its attempts to cut across diverse social and political interest and address many of the struggles within the current scene .

CULTURAL STUDIES DENIES THE SEPARATION OF HIGH AND LOW OR ELITE AND POPULAR CULTURE:

 You might hear someone remarks at the symphony or at art museum “I came here to get a little culture”. Being a “cultured” person used to mean being acquainted with “highbrow” art and intellectual pursuits. But is not culture also being found with a pair of tickets to a rock concert? Cultural critic’s today work to transfer the term popular, folk or urban. Following theorists Team Baudrillard and Andreas Hussein, cultural critics argue that after world war-II the distinction among high, low and mass culture collapsed and they cite other theory such as Pierre Boudoirs and Dick Hedge on how “Good taste” often only reflects prevailing social, economic and political power based.

CULTURAL STUDIES ANALYSES NOT ONLY THE CULTURAL WORK BUT MEANS OF PRODUCTION :

Marxist critics have long recognized the importance of such par literary questions as these: Who published his or her books and how are these books distributed? Who buys books? For that matter, who is literate and who is not? A well known analysis of literary production is Janice Radway’s study of the American romance novel and its readers, reading the romance women, patriarchy and popular literature, which demonstrates the textual effects of the publishing industry’s decisions about books that will minimize its financial risks. Another contribution is the collection reading in America, edited by Cathy N. Davidson, which includes essays on literature and gender in colonial New England, urban magazine audiences in 18th century New York City. The impact upon reading of such technical innovations as cheaper eye glasses, electric lights and trains, the book-of-the-month club and how writers and texts go through fluctuation of popularity and canonicity. These studies help us recognize that literature does not occur in a space separated from other concerns of over lives.

Cultural studies thus joins subjectively – that is, cultural in relation to individual lives – with engagement a direct approach to attacking social ills. Though cultural studies practitioners deny “humanism” or “the humanities” as universal categories, they strive reason”, which often resembles the goals and values of humanistic and democratic ideals. What difference does a cultural studies approach make for student? First of all, it is increasingly clear that by the year 2050 the United States will be demographers call a “Majority – Minority” population, that is the present numerical majority of “white”, “education” and  “Anglo-Americans” will be the minority, particularly with the dramatically increasing number of Latin / residents, mostly Mexican Americans. As Gerald Graff and James Phelan observe “It is a common prediction that the culture of the next century will put a premium on people’s ability to deal productively with conflict and cultural difference. To the question “Why teach the controversy?” they note that today a student can go from one class in which the values of western culture are prorated as hopelessly compromised by racism, sexism and homophobia. Professors can acknowledge these differences and encourage student to construct a conversation for themselves as “the most exciting part of their education”.

POWER AT THE CENTER OF CULTURAL STUDIES :

Power is probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his or her will even against resistance .

                                                                                         Max Weber 
                                                                                       
                                     

The study of Cultural Studies is incomplete without the study of power.Cultural studies makes us understand how we all are controlled by power. in our time media is the tool to control the perceptions and the subject , the power makes extensive use of media.All form of media ,print, radio, tv, electronic, digital, social. The critic  of media studies under cultural studies gives an opportunity to provoke our thoughts to understand how power makes use of media. the idea of power sustain the exact meaning of hierarchy.

Thank You..

ECOCRITICISM & ECOFEMINISM

ECOCRITICISM AND ECOFEMINISM

WHAT IS ECO- CRITICISM AND ECO-FEMINISM :

Eco - Criticism 

Eco - Feminism

TOPIC	KEY POINTS	UNDERSTANDING OF THE THEORY
ECO-CRITICISM	Interdisciplinary point of views	Eco criticism is the study of literature and the environment from an interdisciplinary point of view, where literature scholars analyze texts that illustrate environmental concerns and examine the various ways literature treats the subject of nature. It takes an interdisciplinary point of view by analyzing the works of authors, researchers and poets in the context of environmental issues and nature. Some eco-critics brainstorm possible solutions for the correction of the contemporary environmental situation, though not all eco-critics agree on the purpose, methodology, or scope of eco-criticism.its  scope has broadened from nature writing, romantic poetry, and canonical literature to take in film, television, theater, animal stories, architectures, scientific narratives and an extraordinary range of literary texts. At the same time, eco-criticism has borrowed methodologies and theoretically informed approaches liberally from other fields of literary, social and scientific study.
ECO-FEMINISM	Exploitation, degradation of nature, subordination and oppression of women	Eco-feminist analysis explores the connections between women and nature in culture, religion, literature and iconography, and addresses the parallels between the oppression of nature and the oppression of women. These parallels include but are not limited to seeing women and nature as property, seeing men as the curators of culture and women as the curators of nature, and how men dominate women and humans dominate nature. Eco-feminism emphasizes that both women and nature must be respected. Eco-feminism is a branch of feminism that sees environmentalism, and the relationship between women and the earth, as foundational to its analysis and practice. Eco-feminist thinkers draw on the concept of gender to analyse the relationships between humans and the natural world.The term was coined by the French writer Françoise d'Eaubonne in her book Le Féminisme ou la Mort (1974)