How Literature shaped to me?

                                 

                    What is Literature?

                         

                                    

         

Throughout these five years I came through various definition of Literature. First is very common and famous definition – 

“Literature is mirror of the society”. But it is not so because mirror shows only one side of us while literature shows the dual side of people.

“Literature is something that reflects society, makes us think about ourselves and our society, allows us to enjoy language and beauty, it can be didactic, and it reflects on the human condition. It both reflects ideology and changes ideology, just like it follows generic conventions as well as changing them. It has social and political effects: just ask Salman Rushdie or Vladamir Nanakov. Literature is the creation of another world, a world that we can only see through reading literature: just like Harry Potter and series of it.”

Moreover, What Literature mean in the words of Franz Kafka, that –

“I think we ought to read only the kinds of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? …we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”

Likewise, Julian Barnes’ definition about Literature is something like this,

“The things Literature was all about: love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God.”

According to me,

 “Literature is the treasure of Knowledge which never going to be ends.”

But now the point is that how this treasure of Knowledge shaped me. What kind of knowledge I getting from this treasure?

Let starts from the very beginning at my B.A. level.

“Exaggeration always destroying,

Exaggeration leads towards tragic facts.”

That’s what I learn from “Tughlaq” and the same theme carried out in “Dr. Faustus” by Christopher Marlow; “Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hide” by Robert Louis Stevenson; “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley.

Mary Shelley also talks about the patriarchal power and also tries to deconstruct the idea of it through creating such kind of monster. The importance of women in the society is very low and each and every stage they are humiliated, suppressed or oppressed by male dominance society. But Virginia Woolf highly criticized this society through putting such argumentative point in “To the Lighthouse” that-

Why women cannot write and paint?

Likewise, Milton describe the argumentative nature of women through the character of Eve in the year 1667 that’s what Virginia Woolf proved out into the year 1927 through the character of Lily Briscoe. Even Jane Austen digs deep and carried out how the patriarchal society operates.

So these all text teach me that not be the character like Mrs. Ramsay, who pretending that she is good while she also wants the symptoms of Lily Briscoe, who live life freely. In short individuality is everything. Freedom is everything. One can have the choice to live life how they want to live. This thing I learn from “the Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Afterward, the novel “The White Tiger” by Aravind Adiga, also talks about the same idea that-

Individualism is everything. Why are we waiting for others changes rather change ourselves? I think that India is great country. India finds everything. But this text criticized the idea of habit of India people who believe that India is find out everything. This novel got the criticism that Adiga feeding English people’s mentality through this novel.

So I must say that they have very limited knowledge about the literature. Maybe they not read T.S.Eliot’ “The Waste Land”, who criticized his own land to call it as a Waste Land. So, it teaches me that if we are wrong at some point we must accept it and always be ready to change ourselves. Further in “Gulliver’s Travels”, Swift also criticized his own culture.

Furthermore, the Old man and the Sea, teach me that “EVERY DAY IS NEW DAY”. Dedication, determination and hard work are ultimate truth that I learn from this novel.

“Be Skeptical” towards everything that I learn from Julian Barnes’ “The Sense of an Ending” and from Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code”. Doubt everything and not believe in anything easily.

J.K.Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” teach me that “DEATH IS INEVITABLE”. Fear from the death one cannot harm others existence. Hatred, jealousy, murder is not the ultimate elements for living good life rather love and friendship is ultimate elements to living good life.

In the critical situation God always help us that I learn from Life of Pi by Yann Martel, Chetan Bhagat’s “One Night at the Call Center”, Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code”, and “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville.

Totally opposite to that is what Samuel Beckett talks about in “Waiting for Godot”. It aware us about the RESPONSIBILITIES that human being have. Normally people don’t fulfill their responsibilities so they hide themselves under the curtain of religion. It always reminds me whenever I take breathing that we are habituated to doing the things.

Likewise, we never see ourselves that where are we wrong. We always try to put ourselves into margin. Moreover we always are craving sympathy from other. That’s what the African Literature talks about. They tries to look back to themselves that where are they wrong. What is their fault? In reality we also make ourselves like "BICHARA KIND" of people and want sympathy from other. So it makes our life one step backward. But here all the African Literature not gives us pleasure instead of that it is give us frustration, hatred, anger and what not. These books were not written out of compassion but out of compulsion.

The post-colonial Literature talks about those who are intentionally wiped out from the map or not having voice, it giving voice to them. It is centering the decenter.

In short literature is for those who are marginalized by the power. It giving space to them and talking from their point of view or perspective.

So, in a way I got lots of things from the Literature but when it became the matter of practical use of literature, it may fail. Accept this i more like all theories and all post-colonial literature and some modern literature.

Impact of Media.

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Name:- Gohel Ankita Kishorbhai

Std:- M.A

Sem:-4

Roll no:- 12

Paper no:- 15( Mass communication and Media Studies)

Topic:- Impact  of  Media.

Submitted to:- Department of English, Mahahraja Krishnakumarsinhji University.

Year:- 2015-17

Introducation:-

Mass-Media is communication -whether written, broadcast, or spoken- that reaches a large audience.This includes television, radio, advertising, movies, the Internet, newspapers, magazines, and so forth.

       Mass Media is a significant force in Modern culture, particularly in America. Sociologist refer to this as a mediated culture where media reflects and creates the culture.

    

               Communities and individuals are bombarded constantly with messages from a multitude of sources including T.V. billboards, and magazines , to name a few.

Impact of Media  

        

               The tremendous impact of the media on people just as a coin has two sides, the impact of Mass media also can be positive or negative .

   Let us list some of the positive and negative effects of media.

-   Media provide news and information required by the people.

- Media can educate the public .

- Media helps a democracy function effectively. They inform the public about government policies and programmes and how these programmes can be useful to them.

  This helps the people voice their feelings and helps the government to make necessary changes in their policies or programmes.

- Media can entertain people.

- Media can act as an agent of change in development.

- Media has brought people of the world closer to each other.

-Media promote trade and industry through advertisements.

-Media can help the political and democratic processes of a country. 

- The traditional culture of a country is adversely affected by Mass media.

- Entertainment has become the main component of mass media.This affects the primary objectives of media to inform and educate the people.

- Media promote violence studies have proved that violance shown on television and cinema  have negative effects on children.

-Mass media promote the desire in people to buy and own products those are advertised throughout the media but which not be essential for them.

      Mass media is communication whether written, broadcast, or spoken-that reaches a large audience.

This includes television,radio, advertising, movies, the Internet, newspapers, magazines,and so forth.

          Mass media is a significant force in Modern culture, particularly in America.Sociologist refer to this as a mediated culture where media reflects and creats the culture.

         Communities and individuals are bombarded constantly with messages from a multitude of sources including T.V. billboards, and magazines, to name a few.

Media helps us to evaluate important burning issues and spreads awareness of current events. The society we live in is saturated with media.

         The effects of these media has on society also affects education in a very big way. 

The impact of mass media on the society can be cited in the following ways:

1.   Media has helped in the diffusion of education to the massis by spreading ideas, estalishing common interests that help to spread enlightened culture.

2.   Media plays a significant role in moulding public opinion.It increases social awareness, encourages active partecipation of the individual to realise his duties and obligations, raises his standard of thinking and behaviour.

3. Mass media is a powerful means of public eduction.It has helped in eradicating illiteracy, increasing mass awareness on various social issues,equalizing eductional opportunities, promoting a secular and egalitarian society.

4.  Mass media has improved not only the quality of education but also caters to a larger section of the population.

         Thus, its contribution is both qualitative as well as quantitative.

5. Mass media contributes to the constructive use of our leisure time, which would otherwise have been wasted.

It helps develop new found interest and appreciation on a wide variety of subjects, and also fosters creative ability.

6. Mass media broadens the outlook of people with regard to religion and culture, as it enlightens listeners on information , helping to remove superstitions, taboos and prejudices.

        Thus, Media is becoming increasingly important in the life of adults as well as children.we aquire a great deal of information from the different forms of media such as newspapers, films and documentaries, journals, radio,motion -pictures and more.

         Media covers a information that is accesible to all the different corners of the world.Thus, today no one can be in different to the question of mass media and its effects.

   Conclusion

 Media has played significant role in strengthenig the society.Media is concidered as "mirror" of the modern society.Media which shapes our lives.
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The Major Themes in ' The Sense of an Ending'.

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Name:- Gohel Ankita Kishorbhai

Std:- M.As

Sem:-4

Roll no:- 12

Paper no:- 13( The New Literature)

Topic:- The Major Themes in ' The Sense of an Ending'.

Submitted to:- Department of English, Mahahraja Krishnakumarsinhji University.

Year:- 2015-2017
                                      

            Julian Barnes was born in Leicester in 1946. His recent publication. The Sense of an ending won the 2011 Man Booker Prize. He won many prestigious awards—

-       The Prix Medias

-       The Prix Famine

-       Somerset Maugham Prize

-       E. M. Foster Award

-       David Cohen Prize for Literature

About the text:

                 “The book’s plot read like that a thriller paperback, full of vengeful ex- girlfriends youth suicide and illicit sex.”

                                   Geoff Mak

“The Sense of an Ending looks at the ways in which people distort or tailor the past in an effort to mythologize their own lives.”

                                        Michiko Kakutani

               The Sense of an Ending: a grey, grim near-perfect novella whose title ,borrowed from Frank Kermode’s 1967 classic of literary criticism, suggests a creative extrapolation of the volumes thesis. Since we are born into the middle of things, suggested Kermode, the stories we tell about ourselves serve as consolatory structures, falsifying origins and ends to grant order and meaning to that which has none.

                     The Sense of an Ending refers to the way in which character’s relations end messily, whether through thwarted love or actual lives cut short by their own hand it might allude the reader’s expectations of how this tale will reach a conclusion.

 Summary in brief

             The novel is divided into two parts, entitled ‘one’ and ‘two’, both of which are narrated by Tony Webster when ha is retired and living alone. The first part begins in the 1960s with four intellectually arrogant school friends of whom two features in the remainder of the story; Tony, the narrator, and Adrian, the most precociously intelligent of the four. Towards the end of their school days another boy at the school hangs himself, apparently after getting a girl pregnant. The four friends discuss the philosophical difficulty of knowing exactly what happened. Adrian goes to Cambridge University and      Tony to Bristol University. Tony acquires a girlfriend. Veronica, at whose family home he spends an awkward weekend. Their relationship fails in some acrimony. In his final year at university Tony receives a letter from Adrian informing him that he is going out with Veronica. Tony replies to the letter. Some months later, he is told that Adrin has committed suicide leaving a note addressed to the corner saying that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine the nature of their life, and may then chose to renounce it. Tony admires the following. He briefly recounts the following uneventful forty years of his life until his sixties. At this point Tony’s narration of the second part of the novel-which is twice as long as the first- begins, with the arrival of a lawyer’s  500 pounds and two documents. These lead him to re-establish contact with Veronica and after a number of meetings with her, to re-evaluate the story he has narrated in the first part.

 Main Characters

               The number of characters are not many in this complex novel but the relationship of the characters are quit complicated in the way they behave in the novel. Some of they main characters in ‘The sense of an ending’ are—

1) Tony Webster

             Tony is the narrator of the novel. He is retired arts administrator and lives alone. Tony is at the centre of the novel around whom the other characters are revealed. Tony’s life is stormed with many memories of his past 40 years. In second part of the novel he re-evaluates the first part of his novel. When he receives some amount and document from his ex-girl friend’s mother, he re-established contact with Veronica and tries to solve the puzzling questions. After meeting Veronica Tony evaluates his first narrated story. He makes some conscious observations about class, sex, repression and intellectuality. Tony, when narrated, had a daughter and grand-children. One cannot completely trust his memory because at the age of sixty all events of past cannot be recalled as what truely happened. Tony’s narration can be called unreliable.

2) Veronica Ford

             She is spiky and enigmatic ex-girlfriend of Tony. Her character is very complicated. Her behaviour in her own house seemed mysterious. Later on she dated with Adrian who was Tonys intelligent friend. In the second part Tony tried hard to get some clues from Veronica about Adrian’s diary in possession of Sarah Ford. She knew everything but did not revel anything. One can praise her unselfish act of taking care of mentally retarded Jr. Adrian.

3)Adrian Finn

            He was the brightest student. He was an intellectual man. He evaluated things philophically. He dated with his best friend’s ex-girlfriend Veronica. His diary was in possession of Sarah Ford Veronica’s mother. It is possible that Tony’s letter inspired him to meet Sarah so in his last days, as Sarah wrote, he was very happy. There is possibility of his relationship with Sarah as Jr Adrian looked like senior one and Jr Adrian was believed to be Sarah’s brother. Adrian did suicide for which he gave philosophical reason.

                               Now. After seeing the main characters and their unsolved mysteries lets think about the main themes in the novel. The novel has themes like weakness of Memory Aging, suicide, Eros Thanatos, class conflict.

1)  Weakness of Memory and Ageing

            In youth it is difficult to recall all the events of childhood same way old age is the age when memory gets faded. Weak or lighter. A person doesn’t remember all the events in detail.

                   Why did Veronica’s mother have Adrian’s diary? Why did she want Tony and no one else to have it? Tony finds mining his memory to find answers surrounding Adrian’s suicide. His search literally reveals the weakness of memory as corroboration.

                   “ I don’t envy Adrian his death, but envy him the clarity of his life,” Tony muses in old age.

                   “ When you are in your twenties you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches.”

                 Barnes provides only physical details. Hard facts couldn’t come out from his mind. Tony’s recollection of. Adrian reveal memory to be a fractious and fictious. Tony says later in life.

                   “All my conclusions are reversible.”

            One can not rely on the Past memories as it comes in fragments. The narrator has always made that same reasonable assumption, but act of revisiting his past in later life challenges his care beliefs about causation, responsibility and the very chain of events that make up his sense of self.

     “ We talk about our memories,

        but should perhaps talk more about our forgetting,

        even if that is a more difficult

    or logically impossible-feat.”

      Barnes is brutally incisive on the diminishment of age: now that the sense of his own ending is coming into focus, Tony apprehends that “ the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss”, that he has already experienced the first death: that of the possibility of change.

                   Like everyone, Tony has carried his youth inside him into adulthood, fixed in vivid memory. The advocate’s letter informing him that, 40 years on, he has been left Adrian’s diary in a will, that sets Tony to examining what he thinks his life has been. With its various patterns and repetitions, scrutinising its own workings from every possible angle, the novella becomes a highly wrought meditation on ageing, memory and regret. It seems as if Barnes—

                 “ Wants to tell all stories, in all their contrariness, contradiction and irresolvability.”

                  Memory that is individual, accounts for who we are and what we have become. Early memory is particularly valuable, though it can be misconstrued. Its influence can persist throughout adult life, though what is cause and what effect may be difficult to judge. In ‘The Sense of an ending, Julian Barnes tracks the origin of one particular memory through a long and apparently uneventful life towards an explanation that leaves traces of unease.

2) Suicide:

    Man, who is an intellectual person thinks of suicide due to his own philosophical thinking. We find many famous people all over the world end their life in suicide. In this novel a young boy called Robson commits suicide in the school. After few years Adrian kills himself. The reason of Adrian’s death is not known. Adrian’s death lead the narrator to mine his past. But Tony’s memory, the way it is revealed doesn’t solve the mystery. There are many clues that helps us to conclude but doesn’t lead to on conclusion. Many questions are unanswered behind the second suicide whereas the first suicide was committed after making a girl pregnant. Adrian Was an intellectual genius who went to one of the best universities. He dated his friends ex-girl friend Veronica but his diary was with her mother and the documents sent by Sarah to Tony said that he was very happy in his last days. Also Jr. Adrian, a mentally retarded person, who resembled Adrian’s appearance was taken care by Veronica. Jr. Adrian was her brother. Thus, the clues lead us to think about Adrian-Sarah relationship which might be one of the reason’s of Adrian’s suicide.

3) Eros and Thanatos

                     Eros is erotic love and Thanatos is death. Freud gave the theory that the duality of human nature emerged from two basic instincts- Eros and Thanatos. Freud sew an instinct for life, love and sexuality in Eros. In Thanatos, he saw the instinct of death and aggression. The first leads to the reproduction of the species and the other toward its own destruction. The theme of Eros and Thanatos ran simultaneously in the case of Robinson and Adrian. Here, it should be kept in mind that Thanatos also means death as a personification or as a philosophical notion.

4) Class Conflict

                 Adrian was smarter than Tony. Veronica was an awkward girl. She was a misfit in her family. She was self-conscious to dance in public. She felt humiliated. Tony once spent a weekend at Veronica’s family home. At the time he had felt uncomfortable, Socially inferior, and he was hardly surprised when the enigmatic Veronica took up with more prestigious Adrian. She was class conscious. She choose the better option. This way class conflict is also one of the themes in The Sense of an Ending.

               I have discussed some of the main themes of this novel. Barnes’ prose is elegant, witty and playful. He can be associated with the post-modern writers. He chose an unreliable narrator. He wrote with self-conscious linguistic style, an intertextual blending of different narrative forms –which serve to foreground the process of literary creation, the gap between experience and language, and the subjectivity of truth and reality. Barnes fiction is also based on psychological realism and his themes are serious, poignant and heart-felt. He frequently addresses the nature of love, particularly its dark side, exploring humankinds capacity for jealousy, obsession and infidelity, alongside the perennial quest for authentic love.

  Conclusion:-

 Barnes does not come out and tie everything together. The reader is left to go back through the events and dialogs in order to resolve the mysteries. Regarding passages and many will went to completely reread the novel. Any way the novel has an outstanding qualities that make us pond.

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