Sunday, 19 February 2017
Thursday, 16 February 2017
Preparation for NET/JRF - 18
Topics so far –
Now –
18. The Victorian Age: Part –
I
Victorian Age – I [Poetry]
THE
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
1. An Era of Peace: The few
colonial wars that broke out during the Victorian epoch did not seriously
disturb the national life. There was one Continental war that directly affected
Britain--the Crimean War--and one that affected her indirectly though strongly –the
Franco-German struggle; yet neither of these caused any profound changes. In
America the great civil struggle left scars that were soon to be obliterated by
the wise statesmanship of her rulers.
The whole age may
be not unfairly described as one of peaceful activity. In the earlier stages
the lessening surges of the French Revolution were still felt; but by the
middle of the century they had almost completely died down, and other hopes and
ideals, largely pacific, were gradually taking their place.
2. Material Developments:
It was an age alive with new activities. There was a revolution in commercial
enterprise, due to the great increase of available markets, and, as a result of
this, an immense advance in the use of mechanical devices. (The new commercial
energy was reflected in the Great Exhibition of 1851, which was greeted as the
inauguration of a new era of prosperity. On the other side of this picture of
commercial expansion we see the appalling social conditions of the new industrial
cities, the squalid slums, and the exploitation of cheap labour (often of children),
the painful fight by the enlightened few to introduce social legislation and
the slow extension of the franchise.) The evils of the Industrial Revolution
were vividly painted by such writers as Dickens and MrsGaskell, and they called
forth the missionary efforts of men like Kingsley.
Monday, 13 February 2017
Is technology taking over our lives?
Get in touch with Reality
- Megha P.S, I
M.A. English
Each one of us, in this world has a
ritual, say, the first thing that some people do in the morning is relax and
read the newspaper or solve a Sudoku or crossword puzzle with a steaming cup of
coffee and so on. One among these habitual routines of ours happens to include
a piece of machine, commonly known to humans as mobile phone. Sadly, there are
many who belong to that chunk of humankind that wakes up every morning and tries
hard to ignore that shiny piece of metal that calls out to them as the light
blinking on the screen makes them feel guilty and look like a terrible person
if they do not reply back to the texts and messages from the previous night’s
conversations. The questions raised over here are - Is technology taking over
our lives? Does our life revolve around social media and how much are we rooted
to Reality?
From personal experience and observing
my surroundings, I’ve noticed and was startled to find that everyone these days
owns a mobile phone. It has become a parameter to define our social standing-
be it a small, school going child or a senior citizen, rich and poor, mobile
phones which were a symbol of luxury almost just two decades ago, has now become
part of the ordinary. A tiny piece of machine which served the basic purpose of
communicating while travelling, has now started dictating our lives.
Sunday, 12 February 2017
Confy @ Coimbatore
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND FOREIGN LANGUAGES
Bharathiar University, Coimbatore
Organizes a
Two-Day International Conference on
Cognitive Approaches to Language and
Literature
3,
4 March 2017
Papers
are invited from members of Faculty, Research Scholars and Post Graduate
students of English for deliberations at the seminar.
Papers
related to the seminar theme alone will be accepted for presentation. The
Delegates will be served working lunch, tea, snacks and conference kit.
Accommodation will be provided on prior request with nominal charges.
THRUST AREAS
Ø Cognitive Approaches to Language Learning
and Teaching
Ø Interfaces between Life and Literature
Ø Perspectives on Affect-Reason Dialectic
Interface
Ø Neural Bases for Cognitive Functions
Traceable in Literature
Can the world of books bring solace?
Does literature
stem anxieties, soothe frayed nerves, help us escape difficult realities? As
one bad news follows another, carrying on from 2016, can the world of books
bring some solace? In his farewell address as U.S. President, as he tried to
calm people, both at home and outside, who were anxious about the Trump
presidency, Barack Obama dug deep into Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird: “If our democracy is to work in this
increasingly diverse nation, each one of us must try to heed the advice of one
of the great characters in American fiction, Atticus Finch.”
Quoting Atticus,
he said,
“You never really
understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… until you
climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
These are the
words Atticus Finch tells his six-year-old daughter Scout when she has a
difficult first day at school.
With Atticus
Finch showing up flawed and racist in Go
Set a Watchman, Lee’s second novel published more than 50 years after Mockingbird and set two decades later
but written earlier, some would think it was clever of Obama to bring up
Atticus. Was he subtly asking minorities to understand the other point of view
too, just like Uncle Jack (Atticus’s brother) tells a grown-up Scout in
Watchman: Atticus is a “human being with failings… it’s always easy to look
back and see what we were, yesterday, ten years ago. It is hard to see what we
are. If you can master that trick, you’ll get along.”
Saturday, 11 February 2017
Confy @ Bankura University
Re-imagining
the Nation:
Space
and Boundary in Scotland and India
25-26
February, 2017
Bankura
University, West Bengal, India
Eric Gidal and Michael Gavin, while
developing the theme of spatial humanities and its relation to Scottish
literary studies, comments:“…both writers and scholars of Scottish literature
have long been centrally concerned with questions of place: the texture of
Scotland as a nation is inextricable from the topology of its landscapes, the
history of its transformations, and the struggles over its representations”. Space
and boundary therefore address complicated issues related to a modern nation
state which constitutes unitary significations despite multivalent presences.
Space is interrelated to multiple forms of transformation and representation,
thereby critiquing significant questions of history, geography, politics,
literature and topology as specific spatial forces.
As Henri Lefebvre points out that all
space is political or as Foucault has envisioned the ensuing centuries as
centuries of geography, study of space and boundary increasingly becomes a
complex site of intellectual investment. But space, conjoined with questions of
‘boundary’ as a prevailing normative point of view, further addresses emerging
critical issues. How is space produced and how does it posit new problematics
of cultural mapping through negotiations of ‘boundary’? How do space and
boundary become compatible with the growing insistence on transnationalism and
transculturalism? Diasporic presence, influx of immigrants, variables of
ethnicities, experiments with new cultural forms inflect on complex
re-imagining of the stability of nation states with its so-called celebrated
ideologies of “unum pluribus”.
Confy @ Namakkal
A TWO DAY
NATIONAL CONFERENCE
ON
ENGLISH LANGUAGE,
LITERATURE &
SOCIETY : MODERN
PERSPECTIVES
(ELLS-2017)
Organized by
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
VIVEKANANDHA COLLEGE
FOR WOMEN
Tiruchengode,
Namakkal, Tamilnadu -
637 205.
For more details, click HERE
Friday, 10 February 2017
Thursday, 9 February 2017
Wednesday, 8 February 2017
My last Sports Day in MCC, and the best one too!
76thAnnual
Inter Hall Sports meet
Magdalene
Brown, II MA English
One
of the most awaited events in the even semester of every academic year is the
Inter hall Sports Meet, which is usually conducted in the first week of
February. Well, this year, the commemoration of the sports meet was held on fourth
of February 2017.
Thus
far it has been quite a battle of sorts amongst the five Halls (Selaiyur hall,
Bishop Heber hall, St. Thomas’s hall, Martin hall and Margaret hall) in the
campus but this year was marked special by the participation of a new Women’s Hall
(Barnes hall).
The
events of this year started on 28th of January and commemorated on fourth
of February. The chief guest of the day was Mr. Ramesh, the Vice President of
Tamil Nadu Cricket Association, & Secretary of Kancheepuram Dist. Cricket
Association.
Though
the Inter-hall Sports Meet is a competition between the three men’s halls and
three women’s halls, it also gives a platform for the non-residents to exhibit
their sports through their affiliation in different halls. To be frank, the
non-residents are the backbone of the victory in almost every Hall. The Sports Day
eve ultimately gives every Hall the anticipation of getting hold of the victory
shield. There is no exception in the case of women’s halls. This sports meet is
special for the women’s Hall, as number of men’s halls equals that of
women.
A Novel is like a 'tapestry'...
Rendezvous with an Author
[Chitra Banerjee
Divakaruni]
by
Arvind.R, I M.A
English, MCC
Today I had the good
opportunity to listen to a famous and prolific Indian woman writer, Mrs. Chitra
Banerjee Divakaruni. She was the guest speaker at the Ethiraj College, Chennai,
speaking on the topic, ‘Rendezvous with an author’.
She arrived promptly at
three fifteen p.m. She was given a rousing welcome and reception by the faculty
and students. After the opening address was given, she was presented a memento,
which she gladly accepted.
Here is a brief account of
her life. She was born in Calcutta and raised there. She completed her bachelor
degree in English literature there. Then she emigrated to the United States to
pursue her master degree in the same stream. There, she took up many jobs like
a babysitter, a store clerk, a bread slicer in a bakery, a laboratory assistant
and a dining hall attendant. She was then driven by the urge to write. She
started out by writing poems and became a noted poet, essayist, short story
writer, novelist and young adult fiction writer.
She wrote her major novel,
‘The Mistress of Spices’, which was about a Bengali woman working in the United
States in a grocery store. She skilfully portrays the Indian diaspora there;
understandably inspired by her own experiences. She is a feminist who strongly believes
in women empowerment. Her works reflect her analysis of the woman’s psyche;
their yearnings and hopes. She explores relationships and social stigmas. The
book was a great success and launched her career as a novelist. The book was
later made into a crossover film by Gurinder Chadda, starring Aishwarya Rai.
സമയം പോയതേ അറിഞ്ഞില്ല...
ചെന്നൈ പുസ്തകമേള എനിക്ക് സമ്മാനിച്ചത്
[Ann Maria
Sebastian, II MA English]
നാല്പതാമത്
ചെന്നൈ പുസ്തകമേളയുടെ അവസാന ദിനത്തിലേയ്ക്ക് ഓടിക്കയറുമ്പോള് മനസ്സില് ആകാംക്ഷ
തളംകെട്ടി നിന്നിരുന്നു. ഒരാഴ്ചയിലധിയ്കം നീണ്ടുനിന്ന പുസ്തകമേളയുടെ അവസാനദിനം വരെ
നോക്കിനിന്ന് ഓടിപ്പിടിച്ച് തിരക്കിട്ട് കയറേണ്ടി വന്നല്ലോ എന്ന നിരാശയും,
എന്നാല് അതോടൊപ്പം പുസ്തകമേള നടക്കുന്ന വലിയ കൂടാരങ്ങള്ക്കുള്ളില് എന്നെ
കാത്തിരിക്കുന്നത് എന്തായിരിക്കും എന്ന് അറിയാനുള്ള അതിരറ്റ ജിജ്ഞാസയും.
അവിടവിടെയായി വിദ്യാര്ത്ഥികള്, അധ്യാപകര്, ചെറുപ്പക്കാര്, മുതിര്ന്നവര്,
പ്രായമായവര്, മാതാപിതാക്കള്, അവരുടെ കൊച്ചുകുട്ടികള് അങ്ങനെ പല
പ്രായപരിധിയിലുള്ളവര് അകത്തേയ്ക്കു കയറുകയും, പുറത്തേയ്ക്ക് ഒഴുകുകയും
ചെയ്തുകൊണ്ടിരിക്കുന്നു. ഈ ആരവങ്ങള്ക്ക് ഇടയിലേയ്ക്ക് പത്തു രൂപാ ടിക്കറ്റ്
എടുത്തു കയറി പക്ഷെ ഞങ്ങള് ആദ്യം പോയത് പുസ്തകക്കടകളിലെയ്ക്കല്ല, മറിച്ച്
ഇടതുവശത്ത് കണ്ട ഭക്ഷണശാലയിലെയ്ക്കാണ്! ഉച്ചഭക്ഷണം കഴിക്കാതെ ക്ലാസ്സില്നിന്നു
നേരെ പോരേണ്ടി വന്നതിനാല് ഞങ്ങള് അഞ്ചുപേരും വിശന്നു വലഞ്ഞ അവസ്ഥയിലായിരുന്നു.
അതുകൊണ്ടാവാം പങ്കിട്ടുകഴിച്ച ഭക്ഷണത്തിന് പതിവിലധികം രുചിയും തോന്നി.
Tuesday, 7 February 2017
How a book begins...
Anita Desai and
Kiran Desai on how their writing lives intersect,
and how each nourishes the
other’s work
After a life in
writing, Anita Desai wants her style to be pared down to the minimum so that
the “silences are just as effective as the noise”. Daughter Kiran Desai doesn’t
want the anger she feels about U.S. President Donald Trump and his world to
disrupt her writing any more. “I have been thrown off the normal course and I want to get back to my book,” she says, a book “about power… about a young Indian woman out in India and the world” that she has been writing for a decade and which is slated to be out next year.
Unique
inheritance
As mother and
daughter share the stage at the Tata Steel Kolkata Literary Meet, we get a rare
glimpse into the process of writing of two writers who happen to be in the same
family. For Kiran Desai, her earliest memory of the ‘inheritance’ of a life in
literature was that her mother had a “quietness from being a writer” who
vanished every morning with extraordinary discipline to write. “Her writing
life was part of our existence.” That work ethic and her imagination led to
Anita Desai writing many novels that include celebrated ones like Clear Light
of Day; In Custody; Fasting, Feasting; Baumgartner’s Bombay; The Village by the
Sea, and her latest, the three-novellas-in-one, The Artist of Disappearance.
Kiran Desai, who
won the Booker Prize for her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, says her
mother is her first reader who makes a few notes, which lead to “enormous
changes”. She remembers her mother, on the other hand, writing “very clean”
manuscripts; “I wrote many drafts,” Anita Desai intervenes, gently.
Monday, 6 February 2017
Mnemosyne 2017 Invites you...
Department
of English (Aided)
English Literary Forum
Cordially
invites you for
Mnemosyne 2017
on
Tuesday,
07 February 2017
in
the
Martin
Hall Auditorium
between 9.00
am and 11.30 am
Film
Critic and Senior Deputy Editor, “The Hindu”
will
be the Chief Guest on the occasion.
Modernity and its Malcontents
We
were shocked when Donald Trump won the election. Before that, we were shocked
by Brexit. And before that, by the rise of the IS death cult.
No
doubt, many of us did not expect any of these developments. But do they really
constitute a radical break from the world we thought we knew? Or do they
represent a form of continuity with the past? Belying the narrative of shock
and outrage that has greeted these phenomena, Pankaj Mishra’s latest book, Age
of Anger, emphatically argues the latter.
The
two contemporary phenomena that have exercised liberal minds the most in recent
times are the rise of militant right-wing nationalism around the world, and the
ability of nihilistic outfits such as the IS to attract youth even from the
heart of the developed West, which is supposed to embody all that is great
about modernity. How could so many turn their backs on the liberal values of
freedom, pluralism, material comforts, and human rights to embrace destruction
and suicidal violence?
The
liberal consensus typically blames the ignorance and gullibility of the
under-educated masses for the former (militant nationalism), and Islam for the
latter (terrorism), invoking the idea of a clash of civilisations between the
modern West and a medieval religion that seeks to challenge, if not destroy,
modernity.
What
remains outside the purview of debate are liberal verities about modernity and
its goodness for all. And it is the liberal’s blind faith in the modernist
project — mirrored by the blind faith of the terrorist seeking to undermine it
— that Mishra foregrounds in Age of Anger.
Sunday, 5 February 2017
The Charmer and the Charmed...
The charm that pulled us all on, a host of
like-minded teachers, yonder all the way to Pune, Maharashtra was the legend Bill Ashcroft!Well, it was indeed, an experience of a lifetime!
Bill Ashcroft is quite familiar to students of English Literature, especially with students who have had Postcolonial Studies as a Paper. The pioneering champion of postcolonial studies as a discipline, Bill Ashcroft's initiatives have borne much fruit since then! PoCo Studies has now established itself firmly in educational institutes all over the world. Thanks to his monumental and celebrated work Empire Writes Back way back in 1989 that set the foundation for this birth of postcolonial studies as a discipline in itself, and... there has been no
turning back for Bill ever since!
He’s 71 years old, on paper, but it looks like 'age has not withered him,’ in any way whatsoever. He was pretty cheerful and enthusiastic all through, and he
was in his elements both during his lecture, and also when he was surrounded by
a jostling crowd of enthusiastic fans and research scholars alike, who made a
beeline to him just to have their books autographed by him, and to have their ‘moment
of fame’ clicking away to glory!
The auditorium was packed to capacity with litterateurs
from all over the world – who had gathered in huge numbers and in rapt attention
– to listen to what the wizard of postcolonial studies had to offer!
Rendezvous with Chitra Banerjee @ Ethiraj
Meet
up with
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
On
Monday,
06 February 2017
at
Ethiraj
College for Women
in
the
College
Auditorium
Between
3 pm and 4.30 pm
All
litterateurs are cordially invited.
About Chitra Banerjee
A Dialogical Workshop @ MIDS
Purusartha and Poetics of
Development
A
Dialogical Workshop
February
18, 2017 | 3:00 PM
Chair: Professor Ananta Kumar Giri, MIDS
3:00 PM
Purusartha and Poetics of
Development:
An Introduction and Invitation
Ananta Kumar Giri
3:45 PM
Poetics of Development and the Challenge of
Social Healing and Reconciliation
Dr. Andrea Grieder,
University of Zurich, Switzerland
4:30 PM
Discussion
All are cordially invited.
Note about the Workshop
Purusartha was an
important vision and pathway of life in classical India which talked about
realization of meaning and excellence in terms of four cardinal values and
goals of life-- dharma (right
conduct), artha (wealth), kama (desire) and moksha (salvation). It
provided paths of
Friday, 3 February 2017
Call for Papers
Papers are invited from
PG Students, Research Scholars and
Faculty Members
for the
One
Day State Level Seminar
On
An Insight into Literary Theory
and its Application in English
Literature
On
Friday, 10 February 2017
Organized By
PG and
Research Department
of English
Voorhees College,
Vellore-632001
Registration
fees
Faculty members / research scholars: Rs.500/-
P.G./U.G students: Rs.300/-
The registration
fee includes a seminar kit, tea/snacks and working lunch.
Paper presentation session will
be from 2.00 p.m – 3.00 p.m.
Participants should submit TWO copies of their
papers at the time of registration.
Last Date for submission of Abstracts: 07 February
2017
For more details, kindly click HERE
Wednesday, 1 February 2017
A great learning experience...
40th Annual Chennai Book Fair 2017 – A Review
G. Akil Raj, II MA English
Chennai Book Fair or Madras
Book Fair is an annual book fair organized in Chennai, India by the Booksellers
and Publishers Association of South India (BAPASI). With nearly 700 stalls, the
book fair was organised from January 6 to January 19 at St. George School on
Poonamallee High Road, Chennai. I went to the book fair on 16.01.2017 &
19.01.2017. This essay is a review made by me after visiting the book fair on
the above mentioned dates.
For the first time I went to
the Chennai Book Fair and it was genuinely a great learning experience. And
seeing a book fair in such a grand manner is one of the special attributes that
I would personally allude to the Chennai book fair. With 700 stalls from
various publishers all throughout the city and also from various other places,
Chennai book fair continues to be such a memorable experience. I got to know
about various new books that were published and discovered some books that were
really new to me.
Tuesday, 31 January 2017
Remember the past to inspire the present...
Memory Narratives
The
Fifth T. G. Narayanan Endowment Lecture, 31 January 2017
Jayashree Rajan, II MA English
The Fifth T. G.
Narayanan Endowment Lecture was delivered by Dr. Premila Paul on the topic, ‘Memory
Narratives,’ on Tuesday, 31 January 2017. It was an extremely informative lecture
and had a wide ambit of facts, which were introduced to students for the very
first time. The lecture started at around half past ten in the morning in The
Centre for Media Studies Auditorium, Madras Christian College.
Dr. Premila Paul
who has a huge list of accolades and achievements and is undoubtedly a
wonderful orator, started the lecture with a slideshow of Mr. T. G. Narayanan’s
(1911-1962) who was a journalist with The
Hindu during the war years. He was known for his coverage of the Bengal
famine, the war on the Imphal front and his interviews with India’s freedom
fighters. His writings on the famine were one of the earliest instances of
investigative journalism. His coverage and analysis were recorded in a book
“Famine over Bengal,” and published by the Book Company of Calcutta.
Monday, 30 January 2017
Some to cherish, some to keep, some for its content, some for its cover...
A Journey to the Exterior
Helen Ann Joseph, II MA English
 |
The chai-wallah at the book fair
|
In spite of
exhaustion from exerting myself too much from the physical activity of aimless
walking in the scorching heat on an empty stomach, I decided to visit the book
fair with my pals more to keep my word to them, than my love for books. Discussions,
chats, small talk, gossips, jokes, comments and more were shared among the gang
of friends in the course of the journey, but my mind was preoccupied. Nothing seemed
to divert my only thought. As a matter of fact, I did not want anything to grab
me away from this miserable state of mine. Selfish, self-involvement in a
sensitive, senseless thought disregarding my chit chatting friends satisfied
that inner, ignorant, immature youth in me.
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