Today's Birding Adventures @ the Porur Wetland Zone 💚

 

"His unique contributions acted as a bridge between the literary and visual arts"

Guillaume Apollinaire

A Sensational Surrealist, A Cubist, A Caligrammist, A Bohemian, and more!

#onhisbirthdaytoday

Credited with coining the terms Cubism, Orphism, Surrealism, and other key Modernist Terms

26th August

Guillaume Apollinaire is a pioneer of the early 20th century avant-garde artistic movements in Europe.

He gained notoriety in 1917 with the staging of his play The Breasts of Tiresias. He coined a new word for the play’s subtitle: ‘‘A Surrealist Drama.’’

By ‘‘surrealist,’’ Apollinaire meant a representation that surpassed traditionally simplistic or sentimental realism. He felt that theatre should suggest the infinite possibilities of the modern world, in which science was turning fantasy into reality. The results might shock or outrage traditional audiences, but would appeal to the modern mindset that understands life as an unpredictable blend of tragedy, comedy, and surprise.

His unique contributions acted as a bridge between the literary and visual arts. He became a legend for his artistic daring and his flamboyant, bohemian personality.

Unlike the symbolists, however, whose work intentionally ignored everyday reality, Apollinaire’s strategy was to confront and transform worldly experience. Many themes in Alcools and Calligrammes - images of technology, for example, and the alienation of modern existence - had never been treated before in serious poetry!

A Calligram [concrete poetry or picture poetry or shape poetry,
which combines poetic writing and drawing]

He revelled in the irreverent attitudes of Dadaism, the fragmented perspectives in cubist painting, and the flexible structures of jazz. He deliberately juxtaposed the modern with the traditional, and the serious with the ludicrous, in his effort to grapple with the complicated, contradictory realities of the twentieth century.

His friendship with the young Pablo Picasso marked a turning point in Apollinaire’s career. He became a defender of experimentation and innovation in the arts. His essays on cubism, starting in 1904 and culminating with a book on The Cubist Painters (1913), remain pertinent for art critics. His writings helped bring artists such as Picasso, Braque, and Rousseau to a wider audience.

The Calligrammes, are his most distinctive creation. He coined this term for his visual poems where the typography and arrangement of words form a picture that relates to the poem’s subject. For example, a poem about rain might have its lines cascade down the page. This fusion of text and image was a radical departure from traditional poetic form, blurring the line between poetry and visual art.

Moreover, by abandoning all kinds of punctuation, he also pioneered a Modernist Poetics in his influential poetry collection Alcools (1913). He abandoned all punctuation, since he believed that, the flow and rhythm of the language should guide the reader. This mirrored the stream-of-consciousness techniques that would become central to modernist literature. He also blended modern themes, like technology and urban life, with classical and lyrical subjects.

Literature Source: Gale’s Encyclopedia | Image: Google

One-Day International Conference on "Digital Humanities and Literary Studies" @ Sacred Heart College, Tirupattur, TN ❤️

 

Sacred Heart College (Autonomous)

Tirupattur, Tamil Nadu

 UG Department of English (Shift I)

 Organizes

A One-Day International Conference

on

 Digital Humanities and Literary Studies: Intersections and Innovations

Wednesday, 26th August 2025

"A man has a recurring dream about a treasure in a distant land" ❤️

Literary Hall of Fame

24th August in Literary History

#onhisbirthdaytoday #onherbirthdaytoday

24th August has got its own literary hall of fame.

Three famous authors – each a doyen in their own right – were born on this day.

Jorge Luis Borges, Jean Rhys, and A.S. Byatt!

Although all three writers differ in their setting, style, and subject matter –

Borges known for his philosophical fiction

Rhys for her psychological drama and

Byatt for her intellectual romances

at the same time - all three writers treat literature not as ‘an autonomous entity with a separate reality’ but as a vibrant, interconnected world!

Yes! Borges, Rhys and Byatt are known for their extensive use of intertextuality and metafiction.

So what pray is Intertextuality?

Graham Allen, in his insightful book titled, Intertextuality, gives us very interesting gleanings on the subject.

Texts, whether they be literary or non-literary, are viewed by modern theorists as lacking in any kind of independent meaning. They are what theorists now call intertextual. The act of reading, theorists claim, plunges us into a network of textual relations.

To interpret a text, to discover its meaning, or meanings, is to trace those relations. Reading thus becomes a process of moving between texts.

Meaning becomes something which exists between a text and all the other texts to which it refers and relates, moving out from the independent text into a network of textual relations. The text becomes the intertext.

Intertextuality, like modern literary and cultural theory itself, can be said to have its origins in twentieth-century linguistics, particularly in the seminal work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.

The work of the Russian literary theorist M. M. Bakhtin is crucial here. In fact, Bakhtin’s theories foreground host of different theories of intertextuality.

Julia Kristeva’s attempt to combine Saussurean and Bakhtinian theories of language and literature produced the first articulation of intertextual theory, in the late 1960s.

In short, then, Intertextuality challenges traditional notions of textual autonomy and originality, emphasizing the interconnectedness of all texts.

It suggests that the meaning of a text is not inherent within itself but is produced through its relationships with other texts and discourses.

They all write with a deep awareness of existing literature, often referencing, re-imagining, or directly engaging with other works of fiction and non-fiction to create new narratives. This literary style, characteristic of postmodernism, blurs the lines between original creation and commentary.

As such, each of these three authors is known for building their work upon existing texts.

A.S. Byatt’s most famous novel, Possession, is an academic romance that references Victorian poetry and literature!

Jean Rhys, known famously for her popular novel Wide Sargasso Sea, wrote it as a direct response to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre - the backstory of the ‘madwoman in the attic.’

Jorge Luis Borges could be called a master of intertextuality. His short stories, like for example, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” are often fictions about fictional works or literary concepts.

He creates elaborate literary puzzles that require a knowledge of history, philosophy, and other texts to fully appreciate them. Hence, his works could be called ‘a continuous dialogue with the literary past!’

More on Borges, Byatt and Rhys from Gales Encyclopedia –

On A. S. Byatt

A best-selling novelist, short-story writer, distinguished critic, and winner of many prestigious awards and prizes, A. S. Byatt is one of the most ambitious writers of her generation.

Her short stories are of crucial interest in connection with her overall work and with regard to postmodernist developments of the genre.

Because of her imaginative wisdom and understanding of contemporary culture, Byatt’s short stories significantly enrich the postmodern literary scene.

In 1981 she was promoted to a senior lectureship, and in 1983, when she was elected fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she retired from academic life to write full-time. Byatt’s career as a novelist reached a turning point in 1990, when the publication of Possession: A Romance brought her international fame.

In merging realism and naturalism with fantasy, Byatt has been influenced by an eclectic group of esteemed writers, from George Eliot to Robert Browning. In her midcentury-England novels, she takes inspiration from such writers as D. H. Lawrence.

She references everything from Romantic and Victorian literature to research books on zoology as also informing her intertextual work. But ‘‘The novelist I love most,’’ she asserts, ‘‘is Marcel Proust.’’

A central characteristic of Byatt’s handling of stories is the manner in which they are made to refer to their own status as texts and the ways in which different narrative expectations and multiple types of text—letters, diaries, journals, fairy tales—are merged.

On Borges

Jorge Luis Borges was born on August 24, 1899, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He received his earliest education at home, where he learned English and read widely in his father’s library of English books.

When Borges was nine years of age, he began his public schooling in Palermo, and in the same year, published his first literary undertaking - a translation into Spanish of Oscar Wilde’s ‘‘The Happy Prince.’’

Borges has been called perhaps the best known of the Latin American ‘‘boom’’ authors and “postmodernist Master” of the mid twentieth century.

World Recognition In 1961 Borges shared with Samuel Beckett the ten-thousand-dollar International Publishers Prize, and world recognition at last began to come his way.

‘‘The Library of Babel,’’ (1941), is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. In this fantastical story, a library contains every possible variation of a single 410-page book. In the same vein, Borges writes elsewhere about a map so large that it covers precisely, in 1:1 detail, everything it attempts to represent, so that it lays like a gigantic carpet over the land.

What’s more? 😊

Paulo Coelho himself has acknowledged that, he had based his The Alchemist on this Borges’s Tale of Two Dreamers.

And the plot of both The Alchemist and Tale of Two Dreamers were influenced by an ancient, widely-told folktale which goes like this –

A man has a recurring dream about a treasure in a distant land, travels there, and is told by someone in that land that he, too, had a dream - of a treasure buried in the first man’s own home.

And guess what? Paulo Coelho is also celebrating his birthday today. 😊

"Forest Bathing" & "Aural Immersion" Activity 💚💚💚

On Forest Bathing & Aural Immersion

II MA English Class | Tuning into Nature’s Symphony

23rd August 2025

#greenWalk, #campusWalk, #treeWalk

It was a beautiful Saturday and the blessed rains had painted MCC a tad lovelier today.

So it was, that in the fourth hour, when I entered the II MA English class, I told them that, we are all going to have our class today out in the deep woods.

But before they could embark on their Green Walk, I got them to promise me two blessed assurances –

Firstly, that it is going to be a Silent Walk where no one gets to talk or gesture to anyone else, anytime during the entire course of their silent walk.

Secondly, that, none of us gets to use our mobile phones during the entire 1.5 km stretch of the walk.

These two conditions were to be kept until the moment we reached the beautiful, serene Campus Lake, I had told them.

The II MA Class took a firm resolve to this end.

Then I spoke to them of the advantages of the Silent Green Walk as follows -

It’s called Aural Immersion, wherein we fully engage our sense of hearing to connect with the natural environment, also called, “deep listening,” where you actively tune in to the rich and complex soundscape of the forest.

This practice is called, forest bathing - a Japanese practice of immersing oneself in the forest atmosphere to promote well-being. While forest bathing engages all five senses, aural immersion puts the auditory experience at the forefront.

Aural immersion can help us to involve ourselves in focusing and paying attention to the sounds around us – from the subtle to the most prominent ones.

It can also help tune ourselves to Nature’s sweet symphony, that includes, the rustling of leaves in the wind, the chirping of birds and the calls of other animals, the buzz of insects, the crunch of your own footsteps on the pathway, etc, I concluded.

After this initial orientation, we started out on our Green Walk.

On our way, as we all had resolved, none of us spoke during the entire duration of our Walk.

The rains had made the landscape all the more sweeter for a sylvan walk amidst the lush green woods.

After the Walk that spanned more than a kilometre, we landed at the beautiful Campus Lake.

There, we broke our silence, and started our discussions on how the Silent Walk was therapeutic for all of us. We also started capturing the beauty of the woods in our mobiles. 

Some said that the alternating rays of the sun were a source of delight. Some said that they loved the calls of the birds. Some others said that, during their UG days the lake had much more copious reserves of water. To some, the walk helped them to control the urge to talk. ‘I was almost about to speak to my friend in excitement, but then, I decided not to!’, said one.

I was able to talk to myself, during the entire course of the walk, said another. 

This is the first time I’m coming to the Campus lake, and it is so beautiful, said yet another.

Some said that they were able to connect with a lot many species of beautiful butterflies of all hues.

We were able to spot all three varieties of kingfishers at the lake.

We also spotted the quills of the porcupine, along with a host of peacocks, peahens, and deer along the way.

At a few places we were able to spot puddles of water, that had percolated in certain spots. We then discussed the value of a puddle to the environment.

The Walk ended at around 1.15 pm, with a refreshing time of refuelling at the College Cafeteria.   

PS: You may want to read Ms. Safa’s (II MA Class) take on the Silent Green Walk HERE on her blog.

"If I come to know that AI has stolen my art work, I will come back as a ghost, and sure have my vengeance!" 💜

Is AI a TOOL or a THREAT to human creativity?

The Great Debate | II BA English Class

#classactivity

Today, being a Saturday, the II BA Class was all geared up for their battle of wits.

The topic I gave them was, Is AI a TOOL or a THREAT to human creativity?

While 18 students were in favour of AI as a Tool, 40 of them sided with AI as a Threat!

AI can be a threat only when you fully depend on it. It becomes a very good TOOL, when you use it to ignite the spark within you, said Gifson speaking in favour of AI as a TOOL.

Wait! But why do you guys need a ‘spark’ to ignite your creativity, when you have the fire of creativity deep within you, retorted Akshaya.

“Well, my sister wanted to be an artist. But she couldn’t be consistent in her output. But when she got prompts from AI, she was able to get the spark and she was able to come up with her artistic output on a consistent basis. This is the spark that we meant.”

But don’t you guys think that creativity is something that’s uniquely, inherently human, and that differentiates us from the machines? 

Everyone is gifted in their own sweet ways. I personally feel that the search for inspiration is a journey. The moment you rely on AI for your spark, you guys are missing out on a big journey, said Iniyan.

People rely on AI because of their sheer laziness. These food delivery apps are an example for this. They give us prompts to amplify our laziness.

But wait! Prompt engineers today are using their creativity through AI to get what they need. Eg. You need a building plan, and prompt engineers make use of their skills to guide powerful AI models to generate and refine architectural concepts, ideas, and even preliminary designs.

AI is a job killer especially for creative artists. Artists today are having a tough time finding employment because of the advent of AI in the field of art, said Pompei.

But let me ask you this question! How many of you have ChatGPT installed in your mobile. Almost all of us, right? If it’s a threat, would you all be using it in your mobile phone? Never. 

Only because it’s a tool you use it. So you all agree that it’s a tool, and not a threat! Moreover, those of us who cannot go directly to the Himalayas, always stand a chance of feeling the aura of the Himalayas through AI, said Veda.

Why do you guys need AI Himalayas, when there are such lovely literary texts written by humans on Himalayas, said Shruti.

Someone said that AI is a job-killer. I don’t agree to that. When a person has extraordinary skills, and ample experience, nobody can steal away your job. 

Maybe just around 20% of the jobs are being replaced by AI. But we shouldn’t forget the fact that, today AI and ChatGPT is used for emotional support, especially in the realm of mental health support. 

It also helps in recreating memories by bringing alive photos of our grandparents from the distant past, alive before our eyes, said Gifson.

Already we are using just around a fraction of our brain in our everyday life. If we depend on AI for our creativity, then our brain will start rusting, isn’t it?

Our opponent Shruti said that, we can enjoy the aura of the Himalayas by reading books. But all these books are available as e-books as well.

Gifson said that, if you have skill and experience, no one can pluck away our jobs. But in a capitalist world, if you don’t get the right kind of opportunity, you don’t land yourself a good job.

An advertisement is made through agencies. The lyric writer, the script writer, the music director, amongst a host of people are involved in the making of an ad. But if AI takes over this zone, then all of them end up losing their jobs.

Gifson said we are using AI for our emotional support. But wait? This only says that we have fallen back in our capacity as humans, when we reply on AI for our emotional support. The basic responsibility of human beings is to help each other in times of their emotional crisis.

Let me clarify my point. Many make use of AI for their mental health support system, only because of two reasons – one is poor access to proper mental health care in the vicinity. Secondly, the high cost of consultation fee for mental health support.

But wait! We do our studies for three years to five years for our literature or art degrees. However, all our hardwork, our experience and our learning is destroyed in just seconds, by AI. And that’s why I feel that, AI steals creativity, AI is so disrespectful of creativity, AI degrades creativity, and robs our creativity without permission, said Eshall.

I am a writer, and I use AI for inspiration, but not to replace my creativity. You see, it’s just impossible to get permission from the lakhs of authors from all over the world – most of them like Shakespeare would be dead long past. 

Even we are reading most of these legends for our literature. We did not get their permission for it, did we? So I personally feel that AI is not a threat but a tool.

AI is a propaganda for the capitalist to push people to always be dependent on their Capitalist modes of disseminating power and knowledge. This in a way hampers the intellect, and steals our self-reliance.

Hayao Miyazaki, the creator of the Ghibli art style, himself admitted that, AI art is “an insult to life itself”.

Miyazaki himself was a strong advocate for traditional, hand-drawn animation, where every line and movement comes from a human being’s lived experience, empathy, and hard work. For him, art is an expression of the human spirit, and a machine that can create an image without understanding pain or life is an affront to that very principle.

Wait! All of us human beings are imitators. Right from our childhood imitation is a crucial, innate, and deeply ingrained part of what makes us human. It is not just about mindlessly copying others, but it is a powerful mechanism for social learning, cultural transmission, and cognitive development. As such, we are just trying to imitate Ghibli art style through AI. I don’t think that’s wrong at all.

If William Shakespeare came to know about this, he’d come out of his grave and scream out, ‘Don’t kill creativity. Creativity is deeply tied to our personal experiences, emotions, and consciousness. An artist creates a painting to express grief, a composer writes a symphony to evoke joy, or a writer crafts a story to explore the complexities of human relationships. The work is infused with the creator's unique perspective and emotional landscape, something that an AI, at least as we understand it today, does not possess”, he’d say.

As an artist, I’d want AI to help me with my job, but I wouldn’t want AI to steal my stuff, or do my job on my behalf.

The future of humanity should be inspired by my art work. If I come to know that AI has stolen my art work, I will come back as a ghost, and sure have my vengeance!

Do you guys know something? All the info that you search or ask for in AI/Chat GPT is being released on google. They steal your data for their advantage.

Wait! AI doesn’t steal copyrighted stuff. It’s only the bad guys who do that. AI is a saviour. It works by ethics and strict parameters.

To be continued…

Vox Litteraria 2k25 ❤️

 

EASWARI ENGINEERING COLLEGE

Ramapuram, Chennai

LitCon – 2k25

29th August 2025, 2.30 pm

Literature for ages, has ‘constructed’ crises and has also ‘concluded’ such crises ❤️

A Memorable One-Day National Seminar @ Sadakathullah Appa College, Tirunelveli

Wednesday, 20th August 2025

#Tirunelveli

Early in the morning, today, while still on board the Nellai Express, I got a call from Dr. Hanif, HoD of English, Sadakathullah Appa College, saying that, they were eagerly waiting at the station in Tirunelveli, to receive me. Felt so excited to meet with Dr. Hanif after many years. 

The Nellai Express came on time, and then we three – Dr. Hanif, Dr. Yunis and myself – we headed straight to the next coffee shop in town.

After checking into my lodging, we joined Dr. Pramod Nayar for breakfast at a happening restaurant in town.

We had such exciting discussions over breakfast, on the current state of affairs with regard to literary studies. 

We should make our literary studies more of skill-based, said Dr. Pramod. 

He added to say that, research scholars today are so superfocussed in just one domain, that if we ask them to teach some other topic, they are very hesitant. That’s one reason such students do not end up getting good teaching assignments.

‘You diversify or die’ – this slogan has become the order of the day especially with regard to literary studies, he quipped.

We then discussed on his NPTEL engagements with IITM, and the various assignments he has taken up in recent days.

After breakfast, we then proceeded to meet the Principal and later headed to the Conference venue.

Dr. Prabhakar in his inaugural address elucidated on the semantic drift in the word ‘crisis’.

Firstly, quoting the Merriam-Webster dictionary, Dr. Prabakar said that the word originally meant, “the turning point for better or worse in an acute disease or fever”. However today, the word connotes to mean, “a difficult or dangerous situation that requires serious attention.”

Secondly, he spoke about how as practitioners of literature we respond to a crisis.

Literature for ages, has ‘constructed’ crises and has also ‘concluded’ such crises.

‘We respond, negotiate, and try to resolve the crisis in our own ways through the medium of literature, creating memorable works of literature in the process.’

Moreover, literature orchestrates politics.  

Tamil Nadu is a very good example where political crisis is articulated by artists / poets / lyricists etc. Major political instabilities, crises have been orchestrated through literature. In a way, the poets were the original anthropologists or myth-makers. That way, the universe is made up of tales, not atoms.

Thirdly, as regards crisis of representation, Stuart Hall calls it the ‘crisis of signification’. A student then takes an ideological stance / position and defends it, he said.

Then, Dr. Pramod Nayar spoke on “The Mineralogical Picturesque and the Melancholic Sublime: Aestheticising Crisis in English Colonial Writing”.

Dinakaran Tamil Daily

He started by talking about aestheticization and adoption of aesthetic strategies to talk about frightening things in literature.

I prefer the word ‘catastrophe’ to ‘disaster’ because the word ‘disaster’ has a semi-divine association to it, while the word catastrophe points not to divine interventions but to the problems caused by human beings. [The word kata – down and strophe – turn, would signify to mean a dramatic downward turn].

For example: Deepsea mining today has led to tectonic shifts.

Just excerpts from Dr. Pramod’s Talk -

The ruins were a blank slate on which the whites wrote their interpretations.

Then developed the science of Geology, saying, Geology will come to the colonies. So it’s picturesque on the top, but what’s below? We need to analyse both the surface and the subsurface!

This interestingly coincides with the founding of the Geological Survey of India.

His talk was divided into three parts, highlighting the –

Firstly, on the conventional picturesque

Secondly, on the mineralogical picturesque

and Finally, on the catastrophic picturesque.

Dr. Pramod’s lecture was very highly engaging and contained a lot of very interesting insights with such valuable takeaways! 

Then, I spoke on ‘Trajectories in Climate Hermeneutics: Representations of Climate Crisis in Literature’.

Touching upon Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer and Ricouer, especially the latter’s take on hermeneutics of suspicion and hermeneutics of faith, I spoke on the need for an environmental epistemology, that’s propelled by a dialectical hermeneutics - that combines interpretive and critical perspectives, which would be a valuable framework for understanding and addressing the climate crisis.

This way, dialectical hermeneutics can help to uncover hidden assumptions, challenge dominant narratives, and foster a more nuanced understanding of the climate crisis and its potential solutions.

I was happy to release a lovely book by Dr. S. Khaleel Ahamed titled, English Phonetics and Pronunciation: A Handbook, during the inaugural ceremony this morning.

The book of abstracts, as part of the conference proceedings, was released by Dr. Pramod Nayar.

I was also glad to receive a lovely book titled, Ahayattukku Atutta Vitu, written by Mu. Mehta, and translated by Dr. R. David Raja Bose.

In the afternoon, I was so glad to pay a visit to St. John’s College, Palayamkottai, under the invitation of Dr. Benison, HoD, English, St. John’s. Felt overjoyed to see the impactful work done by Dr. Benison, (an illustrious alumnus of MCC) for the welfare of the student community. 

I addressed the students on the topic, ‘An Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism’. This wonderful book on the History of Tinnevelly, was presented to me by Dr. Benison. Eagerly waiting to read it. 😊

So happy that I could also meet with Prof. Jeba Kingsley, a vibrant Professor with St. John’s, and again, an illustrious alumnus of MCC, (Prof. Monsingh’s classmate) now with St. John’s for more than 15 years now, from the year 2010.

Hearty congratulations to dear Dr. Mohamed Hanif and his wonderful team on having organised such a grand National Conference in a highly successful manner. 

What's more... got the lovely news that our I MA student Fenula has bagged the Best Paper Presenter Award today. Congratulations Fenula. We are so proud of you.

On the whole, a rewarding day in every way.

[Waiting for the snaps from S. A College. Shall upload them shortly.]