Literary Terms

Modernism:

The term modernism is widely used to identify new and distinctive features in the subjects, forms, concepts and styles of literature and the other arts in the early decades of the twentieth century but especially after World War I (1914­18)

The specific features signified by modernism (or by the adjective modernist) vary with the user, but many critics agree that itinvolvs a deliberate and radical break with some of the traditional bases not only of western art, but of western culture in general. Important intellectual precursors of modernism, in this sense, are thinkers who had questioned that had supported traditional modes of social organization, religion, and morality, and also traditional ways of concevning the human self thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsce (1844-1900), Karl marx, sigmund Freud and James G. Frazer whose twelve volume The Golden Bough (1890-1915) stressed the correspondence between central Chritian tenets and pagan often barbaric, myths and rituals.

                                  Major works of modernist fiction following Joyce’s Ulysses and his even more radical Finnrgans Walk (1939), subvert the basic convention of earlier rose fiction by breaking up the narrative continuity departing from the standard ways of representing characters and violating the traditional syntax and coherence of narrative language by the use of stream of consciousness and order innovative modes of narration.

Post modernism

                           The term Post modernism is often applied to the literature and art after World War II (1939-45), when the effects on Western moral of the first World War were greatly exacerbated by the experience of Nazi totalitarianism and mass extermination, the threat of total destruction by the atomic bomb, the progressive devastation of the natural enviornment, and the ominous fact of overpopulation.

                           Post modernism involves not only a continuation, sometimes carried to an extream of the countertradition experiments of modernism but also diverse attempts to break away from modernist forms whic had, inevitably become in their turn conventional as well as to overthrow the elitism of modernist “high art” by recourse for models to the “mass culture” in film television newspaper cartoons and popular music.

                         Post modernism in literature and the arts has parallels with the movement known as postsructuralism in linguistic and literary theory posstructuralist undertake to subvert the foundations of language in order to demonstrate that its seeming meaningfulness dissipates for a rigorous inquirer into a play of conflicting indeterminacies or else undertake to show that all forms of cultural discourse are manifestations of the reigning ideology or of the relations and constructions of power in contemporary society.

                       Many of the work postmodern literature—by Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Roland Barthes, and many others—so blend literary genres, cultural and stylistic levels, the serious and the playful, that they resist classification according to traditional literary rubrics.

                              An undertaking in some postmodernist writings—prominently in Samuel Beckett and other authors of the literature of the absurd—is to subvert the foundations of our accepted modes of thought and experience so as to reveal the meaninglessness of existence and the underlying "abyss," or "void," or "nothingness" on which any supposed security is conceived to be precariously suspended.

                          Literary anomalies are paralleled in other arts by phenomena like pop art, op art, the musical compositions of John Cage, and the films of Jean-Luc Godard and other directors.

Queer Theory

                        Queer Studies is an attempt to redefine sexual identities. It seeks a cultural/political space where the homosexual is no more the ‘perverted’, ‘sick’ other of heterosexuality.

                 In 1969 police raided the Stonewall Tavern in New York City. Many gays, lesbians, transvestites fought back. The subsequent battles and riots received wide publicity. The first meeting of the British Gay Liberation Front took place at the London School of Economics on 13 November 1970, and the first Annual Gay Pride march on 1 April 1972. Since then the  gay liberation movement has sought of fight social, legal, medical and religious oppression and tried to locate a whole new cultural space for the thus far marginalized community.

                 Gay and Lesbian theory assumes that sexuality and sexual preferences/orientations play a prominent role in the construction of social identity. Queer theory argues following Michel Foucault that the homosexual as a social category emerges essentially in the post Renaissance period.

                Queer theory emphasizes the luminal nature of identity. Queer theory interrogates the modes by which sexual boundaries of the inside and outside are constructed sexual identities assigned and sexual politics formulated.

                    Queer theory demonstrates how heterosexuality has been considered the norm and homosexuality as deviance. It argues that identity is secured only through performance and repetition.

Diaspora

Diaspora Literature involves an idea of a homeland, a place from where the displacement occurs and narratives of harsh journeys undertaken on account of economic compulsions. Basically Diaspora is a minority community living in exile. The Oxford English Dictionary 1989 Edition (second) traces the etymology of the word 'Diaspora' back to its Greek root and to its appearance in the Old Testament (Deut: 28:25) as such it references. God's intentions for the people of Israel to be dispersed across the world.

Birth of Diaspora Literature

However, the 1993 Edition of Shorter Oxford's definition of Diaspora can be found. While still insisting on capitalization of the first letter, 'Diaspora' now also refers to 'anybody of people living outside their traditional homeland.’ William Sarfan points out that the term Diaspora can be applied to expatriate minority communities whose members share some of the common characteristics

Robin Cohen classifies Diaspora as:

1. Victim Diasporas
2. Labour Diasporas
3. Imperial Diasporas
4. Trade Diasporas
5. Homeland Diasporas
6. Cultural Diasporas

Indian Diaspora can be classified into two kinds:

1. Forced Migration to Africa, Fiji or the Carribbean on account of slavery or indentured labour in the 18th or 19th century.

2.Voluntary Migration to U.S.A., U.K., Germany, France or other European countries for the sake of professional or academic purposes.

According to Amitava Ghose-'the Indian Diaspora is one of the most important demographic dislocation of Modern Times'(Ghosh,) and each day is growing and assuming the form of representative of a significant force in global culture. If we take the Markand Paranjpe, we will find two distinct phases of Diaspora, these are called the visitor Diaspora and Settler Diaspora much similar to Maxwell's 'Invader' and 'Settler' Colonialist.

Bhabha writes:

"That it is from those who have suffered the sentence of history-subjugation, domination, Diaspora, displacement- that we learn our most enduring lessons for living and thinking."

Alamkara School

The earliest and most sustained school it studies literary language and assumes that the focus of literariness is in the figure of speech in the mode of expression in the grammatical accuracy and pleasantness of sound. This does not mean that meaning is ignored. In fact structural taxonomies of different figures of speech are models of how meaning is cognized and how it is to be extracted from the text.

       Bhamaha is the first alamkara poetician. In Kavyalamkara he described 35 figures of speech. Dandin, Udbhata, Rudrata and Vamana. In Anandavardhana alamkara was sought to be integrated with Dhavani and Rasa. There is a form of suggestion which is evokes by figure of speech and which thus contributed to aesthetic experience.

                       The categories of alamkara have been classified by different poetician into different kind. Rudrata divides it into two types those based on phonetic form its called sabdalamkara and those who based on meaning its called Arthalamkara. Bhoja also divided it into seven types.

1. Sadrasya

2. Virodha

3. Srnkhalabadha

4. Tarka Nyaya

5. Lokanyaya

6. Kavyanyaya and

7. Gudhartha pratiti.

     Mamata also divided alamkara into seven types. They are

1. Upama

2. Rupaka

3. Aprastuta Prasnsa

4. Dipaka

5. Vyatiraeka

6. Virodha  and

7. Samuccaya.

                      

              

Psychological Analysis of “Frankenstein”

                 

                                      In Mary Shelly's ‘Frankenstein’, the two main characters are Victor Frankenstein and his creation. Victor is driven to create this being by his desire for glory which he believes when he unlocks the secrets of life and creation. Victor's creature is a patchwork of human pieces that have been woven together from the deceased to form a superhuman.

                                        One of the most conspicuous features of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel ‘Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus‘ is a strikingly accurate portrait of a pathological narcissist as expressed by the novel’s protagonist, the science student Victor Frankenstein. Victor Frankenstein only one other character appears as fully developed: An unnamed creature, born out of Victor Frankenstein’s grandiose fantasies, scientific skills and pursuit of divine power. All other characters appear as mere scenery on a stage where dichotomies of human nature contrast each other, and where the underlying question of whether or not the two main characters are shadow images of each other is ever present. By focusing on Victor Frankenstein and the creature, Mary Shelley succeeded in creating a novel that mirrors a personal story as well as many of the intellectual and aesthetic themes of the romantic era.

                                             It is obvious that Victor Frankenstein suffers from a mental disorder in the shape of pathological narcissism. Therefore, focusing on the disorder might be a useful prism for the understanding of the novel and its subsequent influence on popular culture. In this articled will find examples in the novel where Victor Frankenstein shows clear signs of having a mental disorder according to Millon and DSM-IV, discuss to what degree Victor Frankenstein perceives the creature as an echo of himself, which not only reflects his mental disorder, but also a fear of the unnatural, discuss the likelihood that Mary Shelley had a personal experience with a narcissist, and thus had a more profound knowledge of narcissism than what she could have derived from the literature, and suggest that Mary Shelley has contributed greatly to the myth of the ‘Mad Scientist’, and to the myth that anthropoeia will never succeed when its maker has a weak and corrupt character such as a vain desire to create a grandiose double of himself.

                           Despite the notion of Mary Shelley being inspired by a romantic archetype of the Shadow or the Prometheus, Mary painted an astonishingly accurate picture of a pathological narcissist in Victor Frankenstein. Surprisingly few literary critics have pointed out this pervasive personality trait in the novel’s protagonist, which might, at least in part, be due to the fact that narcissism and its corresponding pathological description was developed some hundred years later by Sigmund Freud.

In the light of modern psychiatry‘Frankenstein’ is a sad tragedy portraying a narcissist at full blast, a total disaster destroying his own being and the people around him in an obsessive and delirious pursuit of divine power. Indeed, ‘Frankenstein’ is richly furnished with descriptions of incidents that expose Victor Frankenstein’s mental condition.

                        Things could have been different, though. Like all true romantic novels, an innocent and unspoiled being is not cruel in its natural state. As the creature starts to tell its own story about how it learns the ways of life the reader realizes that it is like a ‘noble savage’; innocent, good and free from the corrupting influence of civilization, having no other desires than to love and be loved. Only when faced with its fate the creature turns vindictive and wicked. As Percy Shelley notes in his introduction to Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’; “the destructive consequences of withheld love can only be revenge and wickedness.”

                         At work is a dyadic transfer: Victor Frankenstein calls the inanimate body “beautiful” up until the point where it opens its eyes and looks “wicked”. But the creature is beautiful on the inside, only carrying a bit of bad craftsmanship on the outer shell. Frankenstein’s inability to comprehend this suggests that the creature might be more human than its creator. In fact, all that was admirable and noble in Frankenstein can be seen as transferred to the creature. Of course the creature is misunderstood by the outside world.

                           The centuries old fear about the treacherous, Faustian nature of anthropoeia – of the creation of artificial people – is the true cause of the unraveling tragedy, and not the creature as such. Among scholars this is called a naturalistic fallacy; an erroneous belief in the equivalence of the unnatural and evil, the artificial and imperfect, the ugly and wicked. Only through the reflecting lens of education and civil norms the creature eventually learns to see itself the same way as others do: “Increase of knowledge only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched outcast I was. I cherished hope, it is true, but it vanished when I beheld my person reflected in water or my shadow in the moonshine, even as that frail image and that inconstant shade.” Now the creature only dares to look at itself in the moonshine at night, ashamed of being unnatural and ugly. It has annexed the prevailing beauty ideal by hating its ugliness. It has become naturalized to the fear of the unnatural.

                     It has repeatedly been observed that the literary value of Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ mainly relies on a fortunate convergence of romantic and pre-romantic archetypes creating a powerful mythology of the self. Claiming to be a tale about the modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley successfully blends Greek mythology as inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses (especially, it seems, book three on Narcissus and Echo) with other works such as Milton’s Paradise Lost, Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Goethe’s Werther and Byron’s Manfred. But the truly innovative aspect in Mary Shelley’s novel might lie somewhere else. Her description of Victor Frankenstein’s mental world and behaviour match the definition of a pathological narcissist to such a degree that it makes it quite improbable for her to have based the novel solely on well-developed religious and literary tropes. In other words, Shelley must have had real life experience with narcissism which she subsequently used as template for Victor Frankenstein.

                                        The monster and Victor have many experiences which result in their loss of innocence and almost all of them are linked. Victor, with his view point of a creator, is vastly different from the monsters. The most important experiences that Victor has are the creation of the monster, the death of his brother, the execution of his maid, and the murders of his best friend and wife. These are compared to those of the monster, his creation, the abandonment by his creator, the negative experiences with people (especially the De Laheys), seeing his potential mates body destroyed by Frankenstein after they had agreed upon a deal (that Victor would make the monster a mate, so that he would not be alone, and in return the monster would stop his plans for vengeance) and his merciless murders warp his mind and cause him to allow retaliation to rule his actions until it is too late.

                                              The experiences of Victor, besides that of bringing the monster to life, deal directly with death. He feels, that each one is, although committed by the monster, is because of him, because he created the monster. Therefore these experiences, especially the death of his wife, cause him such pain and suffering that he can no longer deal think in a rational manner.

                                The loss of innocence that, not only will people suffer from human advancement and technology, but that even institutions which he puts his faith into fail. This failure of the institutions is best illustrated when the Geneva court convicts Justine Moritz, the family maid, on circumstantial evidence (of murdering Victor's brother, William), against the family's (Victor's) testimony that Justine would never commit such a crime. When Victor finds out that Justine confesses after her conviction by the court, he learns that she only confessed so that she would not be excommunicated. This failure of the judicial practice to find someone innocent, and then to execute the innocent person, is one more negative occurrence that hastens Victor's experience.

                                  The monster's continuous contact with humans and its negative consequences has left him little choice to sympathies with his creator. In fact, he blames this unhappiness on his creator saying,

"God in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours...Satan had his companions, fellow devils, to admire and encourage, but I am solitary and abhorred. "

                            Since his creator did not create him in a way that would allow him to assimilate into society, and because he is alone, the monster becomes bitter and resentful

Conclusion

                       When Victor creates the monster, he regrets his decision to create life the moment he fulfils it. It seems very shallow of Victor, because he rejects his monster on appearance alone, and does not try in any way to fulfil his responsibilities (as either a God or father). This does not lend the reader to sympathize with Victor's predicament for two reasons; one because he allowed his ambition and desires to overrule reason and second, that he failed to take responsibility for actions.

4.   

What is cultural study?

             First to know cultural study we have to know what is culture. Here I gave simple meaning of culture.

                                      

                                           ”Culture is the great help out of our present difficult; Culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know on all the matter which most concern us the best which has being thought and said in the world: and through this knowledge turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits which we follow staunchly but mechanically.”

                                                                                        -Mathew Arnold                 

                                              Now come to Cultural Study Cultural studies is very hard to define it but cultural studies is not so much a discrete approach at all, but rather a set of practice. With the reference book of Elice Walker novel is ‘The color Purple’ (1982). Through this book, the professor identifies African American literary and cultural sources and described the book’s multilayered narrative structure, moving on to the brief review of its feminist critique of American gender and racial attitude. Students and professor discuss the key facts and the different approaches of the novel. 

                                     A student raises her hand and says about the film version of Steven Spielberg, angry responses from many African viewers. The class member gave the reactions to the points examine the interrelationship among the race, gender, popular culture, the media, and the literature. They question cultural conventions both the side- historical and contemporary.

Cultural studies is not “a tightly coherent, unified movement of agenda”, but a “loosely coherent group of tendencies, issues and questions”. Cultural studies is composed with the Marxism, post-structuralism and post-modernism, feminism, gender studies, anthropology, sociology, race and ethnic studies, film theory, urban studies public policy, popular cultural studies and post-colonial studies.

Michel Foucault came to an idea of power is a whole complex of forces, it is that which produced and what happened, accepted ways to thinking, writing, and speaking and practice that embody, exercise and amount the power.

Location of culture:

             It is the trope of our time to lacate the question of culture in the realm of the beyond. At the century age we are less exercised by annihilation-the death of the author or epiphani-the birth of “subject” our existent today is marked by tenebrous sense of survivle leaving on the boddle eyes of the “present” for which their seems to be no prorer name other then the current and controvercial shiftness of the prefix “post” .

Origin of culture:

                                                   ‘Culture’, derives from ‘Cultura’ and ‘colere’ meaning ‘to cultivate’. It also meant ‘to honour’ and ‘project’ by the 19^th century in Europe it tastes of the upper class (elite).

          ‘culture’ is the mode of producing meaning and ideas. This ‘mode’ is a negotiation over which meanings are valid. Elite culture controls meanings because it controls the terms of the debate.

Culture studies looks at marker popular culture and everyday life. Popular culture is the culture of masses. A culture study argues that culture is about the meanings a community or society generates.

For example,

Drawing from Roland Bartner on the nature of literary language and  claude Levi-Strauss on anthropology, cultural studies was influenced by structuralism and post structuralism. Jacques Derrida’s “deconstruction” of the world distinct, like all his deconstructions or enabled cultural critics “to erase culture, classic and popular literals texts and literature and other cultural discourses that following Derrida may same textually”. 

The discipline of psychology has also entered the field of cultural studies. For example, Jacques Lacan’s psycho analytic language prompted emphasis upon language and power as symbolic systems.

Definition of cultural studies:

four goals of Cultural Studies :

(1)     Cultural Studies transcends the confiner of a particular discipline such as literacy criticism or history.

(2)     Cultural studies are politically engaged.

(3)     Cultural studies deny the separation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ are elite and popular culture.

(4)     Cultural studies analyze not only the cultural work, but also the means of production.

(1)     Cultural Studies transcends the confiner of a particular discipline such as literacy criticism or history.

                   A cultural study is practiced in such journals as critical Inquiry, Representation and boundary. Italian Opera, a Latino ‘telenovela’ the architectural styles of prisons, body piercing – and drawing conclusion about the changes in textual phenomena over time-such things are found in these kinds of newspapers cultural studies not simply or essentially about literature in the traditional sense or even about “Art”.

Lawrence Grosberg, cary Nelson, and Paula. Trencher stress that the intellectual promise of cultural studies lies in its attempts to “cut across diverse social and political interests and address many of the struggles within the current scene.” Intellectual works are not limited by their “borders” as single text, historical problems or disciplines, and the critical own personal connections to what is analyzed and described. Henry Giroux and others write in their “Dalhousie Revise” manifesto that cultural studies practitioners are ‘resisting intellectuals’ who see what they do as “an emancipator project” as it erodes the traditional disciplinary divisions in most institutions of higher educational. For students, this sometimes means that a professor might make his or his own political view part of the instruction, which of course, can lead to problems. But this kind of criticism, like feminism, is an engaged rather than a detached activity.

(2)     Cultural Studies is politically engaged:

          The cultural critics see themselves as “Oppositional” not only within their own discipliner but to many of the power structures of society at large. The cultural critics question inequalities within power structures and try to find out the models for restructuring relationships among the dominant and “minority” of “Subaltern” discourses. The meaning and individual subjectivity are culturally constructed, they can thus be reconstructed. This type of idea, taken to a Philosophical extreme, demise the autonomy of the individual whether an actual person or a character in literature, a rebuttal of the traditional humanistic “Great man” or “Great Book” theory and a relocation of esthetics and culture from the ideal realsm of taste and sensibility into the arena of a whole society’s everyday life as it is constructed.

(3)     Cultural studies demise the separation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ or elite and popular culture.

                   In our society basically we have three class. In these days cultural critics work to transfer the term culture to include mass culture, whether popular, folk, or urban. Jean Belldrillard, Andreas Huyssen and some other critics of cultural studies argue that after World War II the distinction among high low and mass culture collapsed. They look forward on other theorists like pierre Bourdieu and Dick Hebdige on how “good taste often only reflects prevailing social, economic and political power bases.”

Jean Baudrillard and Andreas who were the theorists and argued that after World War II the distinctions among high, law and mass culture collapsed and they cite other theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu and Dick Hebdige on how “good taste” and reflects prevailing social, economic and political power bases. Their argument for white superiority and worldwide domination of other races especially Asians.

                                    French historian Michel de certeau, cultural critic examine “the practice of everyday’s life” studying literature as an anthropologist world, as a phenomenon of culture, including a culture’s economy. Transgressing of boundaries among discipline law and high can make cultural studies research paper with the title: - The birth of Captain Jack Sparrow; an analysis and four sources of Johnny Depp’s funky performance in Disney’s pirates of the Caribbean: The course of the Black Pearl (2003), you could research cultural topics ranging from the trade economics of the sea two hundred years ago.     

4.    Cultural Studies analyses not only the cultural work, but also the means of production.

                                        Marxist critics have long recognized the importance of such paraliterary question as these: who supports a given artists? Who publishes his or her book, and how are these book distributed? Who buys book? For what matter who is literate and who is not? A well-known analysis of literary production is Janice Redway’s study of American romance novel, Reading the Romance, Woman, patriarchy and popular literature which demonstrates the textual effect of publishing industry’s decision about the books that will minimize its financial risks. Cultural studies thus join subjectivity and the cultural in location to individual lives with engagement a direct approach to attacking social ills. Cultural studies practitioners deny,“Humanism” or “the humanities” as universal categories which resembles the goals and values of humanistic and democratic ideals.

Conclusion:

                 Thus we can say that Cultural Studies have it’s own aspectes, scope and aim .We sawn cultural studies aim in detail. These are main goals of Cultural Studies. Thus cultural studies seeks to understand how meaning is generated disseninated and produced from the social, political and economic.