বৃহস্পতিবার, ২৭ ডিসেম্বর, ২০১২
বৃহস্পতিবার, ২০ ডিসেম্বর, ২০১২
A Witness to Chatro League Brutality
I went to central library to read German Ideology and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, two of the many books standing before me as a threatening experience!
I started reading managing a chair in the reference section along with Arif, Rokon and Russel. I remembered I should help Dolon to make his digital library card. I sent a message to her and then gave my full attention to German Ideology and I was going on well and my speed was satisfactory.
I read 15-20 page when I heard sound of talking in the paper section. It was a great nuisance for me and the students who were reading then. Slowly the sounds grew louder and we were listening the sound of slapping and beating and shouting from the student who was crying and also the students who were the reasons of his crying.
Like many of the curious students who left their seats to see what was happening there I also stood up.
And I see their what Bisshojeet might have experienced!
A round faced handsome student was being beaten by some chatro league leaders. I know the faces of both of the students. The student who was leading the attack on the other is also a smart, dashing face in the campus. He rode around the campus with his bike and he is from Surjosen hall. I don't know the name of any of the two leading characters of that drama of great assault on humanity. (Later I know that the leader of the assault was 'Baten' and the victim was 'Mostafiz')
The student was appealing to the students who were reading and the library authorities to save him from the attack on his life in the library, the library, the very place where a student should sharpen his human faculties to the utmost. Here we saw this cruel attack on a student, whom I knew to be a regular student of the library. He used to had tea around us but he wouldn't mix with us but used to see with a curious eye.
Now the cadres began to snatch him away from the library so that they can beat him well outside.
And he was brought outside and beaten till he became bare and only the underwear in his body and he fall to the ground. The attackers left him in the ground.
He was lying in front of central library conscious or unconscious I don't know.
After 10 minutes or more the proctorial team came and took him to the hospital.
19-12-2012
I started reading managing a chair in the reference section along with Arif, Rokon and Russel. I remembered I should help Dolon to make his digital library card. I sent a message to her and then gave my full attention to German Ideology and I was going on well and my speed was satisfactory.
I read 15-20 page when I heard sound of talking in the paper section. It was a great nuisance for me and the students who were reading then. Slowly the sounds grew louder and we were listening the sound of slapping and beating and shouting from the student who was crying and also the students who were the reasons of his crying.
Like many of the curious students who left their seats to see what was happening there I also stood up.
And I see their what Bisshojeet might have experienced!
A round faced handsome student was being beaten by some chatro league leaders. I know the faces of both of the students. The student who was leading the attack on the other is also a smart, dashing face in the campus. He rode around the campus with his bike and he is from Surjosen hall. I don't know the name of any of the two leading characters of that drama of great assault on humanity. (Later I know that the leader of the assault was 'Baten' and the victim was 'Mostafiz')
The student was appealing to the students who were reading and the library authorities to save him from the attack on his life in the library, the library, the very place where a student should sharpen his human faculties to the utmost. Here we saw this cruel attack on a student, whom I knew to be a regular student of the library. He used to had tea around us but he wouldn't mix with us but used to see with a curious eye.
Now the cadres began to snatch him away from the library so that they can beat him well outside.
And he was brought outside and beaten till he became bare and only the underwear in his body and he fall to the ground. The attackers left him in the ground.
He was lying in front of central library conscious or unconscious I don't know.
After 10 minutes or more the proctorial team came and took him to the hospital.
19-12-2012
মঙ্গলবার, ১৮ ডিসেম্বর, ২০১২
Let Me Say (amake bolte dao) by Mrittika Chakma (The Hill Still Cry)
Let me say
I've listened your praising for long.
My ears are jampacked
No more, this time let me say
I've been made machine doll
I dance as you direct
I've been made pet bird
I say what you say
I've been made camel of the desert
I carry whatever you give.
Let me say
It is time, lets speak
If not I'll shout to speak up with full volume
I'm man/human, I have love
I want lover
I'll love you freely
So/then you don't have the right to bar against me
Giving and receiving love is worldly accepted
So I'll give love to my lover.
I've listened your praising for long.
My ears are jampacked
No more, this time let me say
I've been made machine doll
I dance as you direct
I've been made pet bird
I say what you say
I've been made camel of the desert
I carry whatever you give.
Let me say
It is time, lets speak
If not I'll shout to speak up with full volume
I'm man/human, I have love
I want lover
I'll love you freely
So/then you don't have the right to bar against me
Giving and receiving love is worldly accepted
So I'll give love to my lover.
সোমবার, ১৭ ডিসেম্বর, ২০১২
Some Harsh Words for Shakespeare
Whatever genius he is we should read him critically like any other English writer. He was living in that age when England began to set colonies worldwide and he was not critical of any of the misgivings of English or he had no foresight to see what colonialism will do in future. We will get clear mark in his plays of racism, apartheid and colonial mentality. And that his characterization is also questionable. Unfortunately there is a language of awe, over admiration in the mouthy professors of English in Bangladesh. Even in America students need not to go study Shakespeare as much we do. Christopher Merrill told us in an adda.
Shakespeare never used London or any other cities of England in his plays. He used other European and Continental cities there i.e. Milan, Venice etc and even his characters are named not as any English Malvolio, Othello, Desdemona, Iago, Antonio, Bassanio, Shylock, Cordelia etc( of course Henry, Richard and few more can be found in England but he dared not to set his plays in England!)
Shakespeare never used London or any other cities of England in his plays. He used other European and Continental cities there i.e. Milan, Venice etc and even his characters are named not as any English Malvolio, Othello, Desdemona, Iago, Antonio, Bassanio, Shylock, Cordelia etc( of course Henry, Richard and few more can be found in England but he dared not to set his plays in England!)
Victory Day
Our ancestors made their highest sacrifice-
gave their blood, lives and all to give us a free state. Lets we, in our
time struggle as hard as them to make this freedom
meaningful. Lets make impossible possible remembering our past glory and
celebrate the present with hard work and dedication and welcome the
future with vision and mission to make this country one of the finest,
richest, developed and peaceful countries of the world. Lets we sit with
the world communities with honor and dignity.
Lets we stand on ourselves.
Lets we work together.
Lets this victory day to be the beginning point our journey ahead of us where all the glories and victories are waiting..
Lets we stand on ourselves.
Lets we work together.
Lets this victory day to be the beginning point our journey ahead of us where all the glories and victories are waiting..
রবিবার, ৯ ডিসেম্বর, ২০১২
Sermons of Sabidin
You can have some good time with your friends, some better with the family, but the best time you can have with you and yourself.
*sermons of Sabidin Ibrahim:):):D
*sermons of Sabidin Ibrahim:):):D
বুধবার, ২৮ নভেম্বর, ২০১২
Even in Sorrow Life is Sweet, Life is Sweet
"I was a poet and a grand gentleman, I fell in love;"*
I fell in the pit
I couldnt wake up
My wings were broken
And I crawled and crawled and caught the reed
and piping the songs of eternal sorrows.
'Even in sorrow life is sweet; life is sweet".*
*(Dostoevsky,Notes From Underground)
I fell in the pit
I couldnt wake up
My wings were broken
And I crawled and crawled and caught the reed
and piping the songs of eternal sorrows.
'Even in sorrow life is sweet; life is sweet".*
*(Dostoevsky,Notes From Underground)
মঙ্গলবার, ২৭ নভেম্বর, ২০১২
On Silences and Loneliness
Silence and loneliness are my continuous partner.
I photographed them with me many a long years back!
When I have the two, I don't need any.
I'm desperately alone in the crowd-
And I'm crowded with silences and loneliness.
I learned not to mind the silences.
8:21pm, Sun 18 11 12
@ My Cave of Hera
"Cliffs are lonely" -
Dr. Monmohan Singh
Prime Minister, India
I photographed them with me many a long years back!
When I have the two, I don't need any.
I'm desperately alone in the crowd-
And I'm crowded with silences and loneliness.
I learned not to mind the silences.
8:21pm, Sun 18 11 12
@ My Cave of Hera
"Cliffs are lonely" -
Dr. Monmohan Singh
Prime Minister, India
সোমবার, ২৬ নভেম্বর, ২০১২
Who Are Friends
Friends are those who keep his anger aside from his friend
Friends are those who understand misunderstandings
Friends are those with whom no network needed
They talk by the vibration
They see themselves closing eyes
They feel themselves without being in touch
Friends are those who never say goodbye
Friends are those who don't make one anger the last
They accept such angers, misunderstanding may come again and again.
09:36pm, Mon 19 11 12
Friends are those who understand misunderstandings
Friends are those with whom no network needed
They talk by the vibration
They see themselves closing eyes
They feel themselves without being in touch
Friends are those who never say goodbye
Friends are those who don't make one anger the last
They accept such angers, misunderstanding may come again and again.
09:36pm, Mon 19 11 12
শনিবার, ২৪ নভেম্বর, ২০১২
Age of Heroes, Heroism, Code of Conduct and their Urge for Immortality
It was a great age of heroes and warriors. They deserved special place in the society. And all other persons of the society used to see them in an admirable eyes. And the heroes also had to maintain certain code of conducts. They had to come into the rescue of the race and nation when any crisis or danger fell upon them. They even went outside their country to win more glory by fighting with the enemies of the neighboring countries.
In doing so heroes risked their life to the maximum.
They even ended up with their valuable life. After their death the ritual used to go for many days and all of the members of the society used to take part in the mourning process. The greater the hero was the greater the monument would be. The monuments were built nearby the sea so that far away from the land they could be seen by people on the sea. Their urge for immortality and name and fame was noteworthy and clearly manifested in their works.
In doing so heroes risked their life to the maximum.
They even ended up with their valuable life. After their death the ritual used to go for many days and all of the members of the society used to take part in the mourning process. The greater the hero was the greater the monument would be. The monuments were built nearby the sea so that far away from the land they could be seen by people on the sea. Their urge for immortality and name and fame was noteworthy and clearly manifested in their works.
বুধবার, ২১ নভেম্বর, ২০১২
Nostalgic
All the characters from my childhood hovered around me today(yesterday) in my dream.
Iqbal, my comrade and a dashing cricketar
Delu, the cool batsman, gentle, slow but steadfast,
Tipu, the swift runner the rebel against me ,
They came to me with the ball, bat and stamps,
asked me to be hurry-
"Hurry up! It's time! Hurry up ! It's time!"
Time is going,
Lets go captain!
Lets go captain!
Time is now
Lets play hard
Lets play tough
Lets play fine.
The opposition/enemy is in the field now-
09:36am, Mon 12 11 12
Iqbal, my comrade and a dashing cricketar
Delu, the cool batsman, gentle, slow but steadfast,
Tipu, the swift runner the rebel against me ,
They came to me with the ball, bat and stamps,
asked me to be hurry-
"Hurry up! It's time! Hurry up ! It's time!"
Time is going,
Lets go captain!
Lets go captain!
Time is now
Lets play hard
Lets play tough
Lets play fine.
The opposition/enemy is in the field now-
09:36am, Mon 12 11 12
মঙ্গলবার, ২০ নভেম্বর, ২০১২
Beowulf : Socio-political Scenario Presented in it
Beowulf has often been mined for historical information. Rather more rarely have historians applied their expertise to the elucidation of the poem's literary qualities.
Recent scholarship has tended to see Beowulf as less romantic and more sophisticated than earlier scholarship did; it has de-emphasized folklore, mythology, and legendary history as preferred contexts for reading Beowulf in favor of the social and political life of Anglo-Saxon England itself.
The evidence of the Anglo-Saxons' own interest in the poem lies chiefly in the manuscript itself. It is of the late tenth or early eleventh century, a long time after the composition of the poem, which is usually thought to have taken place no later than the eighth century.
The way in which battles and war, the favourite occupation of our antiquity, are described deserves our attention before all else. There is something glorious in every battle-scene. Wolf, eagle and raven with joyous cry go forward in the van of the army, scenting their prey.
In Old English poetry the wolf, the eagle and the raven occur as satellites of battle some sixteen times in all. Wherever they come they convey the expectation of slaughter.
The Beowulf poet uses the same imagery at the end of the speech which near the end of the poem foretells the destruction of the Geatish nation now that Beowulf is dead.
The society, as in all heroic poetry, is aristocratic; there is no attempt to envisage a whole people. Even within its limits the picture is fragmentary, and we have but a partial account of matters connected with warfare, the business and occupation of king and retinue. There is no description of their habitual acts and employment. Except incidentally there is no reference to hunting, riding in contest, amusements and the like; the ordinary facts of life are taken for granted, likewise the familiar surroundings.
The hall is not described nor its contents. Feasting is mentioned, so unlike Homer, except in the most general terms. Drinks, especially wine, are just named, and wine was common in sixth-century England, known but hardly common in Scandinavia. The vessels too are named only in a general way, sincfaet, sele-ful, wunderfatu. Richly ornamented and costly bowls were certainly known, but the commoner sort of dish does not come in at all; nor does silver or glass, though a costly Anglo-Saxon goblet of glass was made, valued and exported. Everything specifically indicated is gold. Tapestries are mentioned...
Recent scholarship has tended to see Beowulf as less romantic and more sophisticated than earlier scholarship did; it has de-emphasized folklore, mythology, and legendary history as preferred contexts for reading Beowulf in favor of the social and political life of Anglo-Saxon England itself.
The evidence of the Anglo-Saxons' own interest in the poem lies chiefly in the manuscript itself. It is of the late tenth or early eleventh century, a long time after the composition of the poem, which is usually thought to have taken place no later than the eighth century.
The way in which battles and war, the favourite occupation of our antiquity, are described deserves our attention before all else. There is something glorious in every battle-scene. Wolf, eagle and raven with joyous cry go forward in the van of the army, scenting their prey.
In Old English poetry the wolf, the eagle and the raven occur as satellites of battle some sixteen times in all. Wherever they come they convey the expectation of slaughter.
The Beowulf poet uses the same imagery at the end of the speech which near the end of the poem foretells the destruction of the Geatish nation now that Beowulf is dead.
The society, as in all heroic poetry, is aristocratic; there is no attempt to envisage a whole people. Even within its limits the picture is fragmentary, and we have but a partial account of matters connected with warfare, the business and occupation of king and retinue. There is no description of their habitual acts and employment. Except incidentally there is no reference to hunting, riding in contest, amusements and the like; the ordinary facts of life are taken for granted, likewise the familiar surroundings.
The hall is not described nor its contents. Feasting is mentioned, so unlike Homer, except in the most general terms. Drinks, especially wine, are just named, and wine was common in sixth-century England, known but hardly common in Scandinavia. The vessels too are named only in a general way, sincfaet, sele-ful, wunderfatu. Richly ornamented and costly bowls were certainly known, but the commoner sort of dish does not come in at all; nor does silver or glass, though a costly Anglo-Saxon goblet of glass was made, valued and exported. Everything specifically indicated is gold. Tapestries are mentioned...
সোমবার, ১৯ নভেম্বর, ২০১২
Truth is a Fearful Friend
Truth is a fearful friend
It drives away all of your closer friends-
Your dear family, your friends so dear, your friends of past, present and even future
You turn into a solitary reaper
'as solitary as that of a savage.'
Harvesting your own crops-
ploughing, digging, collecting, gathering with the same hands
day and night
morning and evening
waking and sleeping.
'Every decent man of our age must be a coward and a slave.
That is his normal condition.'
11:48pm, Mon 19 11 12
Drafted @ Central Library
Edited @Lalbagh
It drives away all of your closer friends-
Your dear family, your friends so dear, your friends of past, present and even future
You turn into a solitary reaper
'as solitary as that of a savage.'
Harvesting your own crops-
ploughing, digging, collecting, gathering with the same hands
day and night
morning and evening
waking and sleeping.
'Every decent man of our age must be a coward and a slave.
That is his normal condition.'
11:48pm, Mon 19 11 12
Drafted @ Central Library
Edited @Lalbagh
My Favorite Company
08:21pm, Sun 18 11 12
Silence and loneliness are my continuous partner.
I photographed them with me many a long years back!
When I have the two, I don't need any.
I'm desperately alone in the crowd-
And I'm crowded with silences and loneliness.
I learned not to mind the silences.
@ My Hera Guha
*Cliffs are lonely said Monmohan Singh...
11:20pm, Sun 18 11 12
On Sleep
02:38pm, Sun 18 11 12
Sleep is a very gentle and beautiful guest
Keep your door open whenever she comes!
Let her never go without your humble hug
She is shy
Might leave you for long
If you dishearten her.
She is to be caressed as the newly married wife!
Sleep is a very gentle and beautiful guest
Keep your door open whenever she comes!
Let her never go without your humble hug
She is shy
Might leave you for long
If you dishearten her.
She is to be caressed as the newly married wife!
বুধবার, ১৪ নভেম্বর, ২০১২
Henrik Ibsen: A Doll's House :: Notes
A woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view.
George Bernard Shaw opined on "A Doll's House" that "When he(Torvald) goes on to tell her (Nora) that commercial dishonesty is generally to be traced to the influence of bad mothers. All her illusions about herself are now shattered. She sees herself as an ignorant and silly woman, a dangerous mother, and a wife kept for her husband's pleasure merely; but she clings all the harder to her illusion about him: He is still the ideal husband who would make any sacrifice to rescue her from ruin.
The final disillusion comes when he , instead of at once proposing to pursue this ideal line of conduct when he hears of the forgery, naturally enough flies into a vulgar rage and heaps invective on her for disgracing him. Then she sees that their whole family life has been a fiction: their home a mere doll's house in which they have been playing at ideal husband and father, wife and mother.
So she leaves him then and there and goes out into the real world to find out its reality for herself, and to gain some position not fundamentally false, refusing to see her children again until she is fit to be in charge of them, or to live with him until she and he become capable of a mere honorable relation to one another.
Muriel C. Bradbrook (1909-1993) in her analysis in "A Doll's House: Ibsen the Moralist" suggests that Nora slowly discovers the fundamental bankruptcy of her marriage. Bradbrook calls it "eight years' prostitution".
She also shows the true extent of Torvald's possessiveness and immaturity. As Bradbrook says, the true moment of recognition in the Greek tragic scene occurs when Nora sees both herself and Torvald in their true nature. She does understand that she has lived by what Virginia Woolf called "the slow waterlogged sinking of her will into his."
In act-1, no less than six different episodes bring out the war that is secretly waged between his masculine dictatorship and her feminine wiles:
So when the crush comes, she cries, " I have been living with a strange man."
The climax of the play comes when Nora sees Torvald and sees herself; it is an anagnorisis, a recognition. Nora says, "I have made nothing of my life... I must stand quite alone...it is necessary to me..."
Whilst the Ibsenites might have conceded that Torvald is 'Art', they would probably have contended that Nora is 'Truth'. Nora, however, is much more that revolting wife. She is not a misantropist or a fighting suffragette, but a lovely young woman who knows that she still holds her husband firmly infatuated after eight years of marriage..
Leaving of Nora: In leaving her husband Nora is seeking a fuller life as a human being. She is emancipating herself. Yet the seeking itself is also a renunciation, a kind of death-" I must stand alone".
She is as broken as Torvald in the end. But she is a strong character and he is a weak one. She was putting herself outside society, inviting insult, destitution, and loneliness. She went out into a very dark night.
George Bernard Shaw opined on "A Doll's House" that "When he(Torvald) goes on to tell her (Nora) that commercial dishonesty is generally to be traced to the influence of bad mothers. All her illusions about herself are now shattered. She sees herself as an ignorant and silly woman, a dangerous mother, and a wife kept for her husband's pleasure merely; but she clings all the harder to her illusion about him: He is still the ideal husband who would make any sacrifice to rescue her from ruin.
The final disillusion comes when he , instead of at once proposing to pursue this ideal line of conduct when he hears of the forgery, naturally enough flies into a vulgar rage and heaps invective on her for disgracing him. Then she sees that their whole family life has been a fiction: their home a mere doll's house in which they have been playing at ideal husband and father, wife and mother.
So she leaves him then and there and goes out into the real world to find out its reality for herself, and to gain some position not fundamentally false, refusing to see her children again until she is fit to be in charge of them, or to live with him until she and he become capable of a mere honorable relation to one another.
Muriel C. Bradbrook (1909-1993) in her analysis in "A Doll's House: Ibsen the Moralist" suggests that Nora slowly discovers the fundamental bankruptcy of her marriage. Bradbrook calls it "eight years' prostitution".
She also shows the true extent of Torvald's possessiveness and immaturity. As Bradbrook says, the true moment of recognition in the Greek tragic scene occurs when Nora sees both herself and Torvald in their true nature. She does understand that she has lived by what Virginia Woolf called "the slow waterlogged sinking of her will into his."
In act-1, no less than six different episodes bring out the war that is secretly waged between his masculine dictatorship and her feminine wiles:
So when the crush comes, she cries, " I have been living with a strange man."
The climax of the play comes when Nora sees Torvald and sees herself; it is an anagnorisis, a recognition. Nora says, "I have made nothing of my life... I must stand quite alone...it is necessary to me..."
Whilst the Ibsenites might have conceded that Torvald is 'Art', they would probably have contended that Nora is 'Truth'. Nora, however, is much more that revolting wife. She is not a misantropist or a fighting suffragette, but a lovely young woman who knows that she still holds her husband firmly infatuated after eight years of marriage..
Leaving of Nora: In leaving her husband Nora is seeking a fuller life as a human being. She is emancipating herself. Yet the seeking itself is also a renunciation, a kind of death-" I must stand alone".
She is as broken as Torvald in the end. But she is a strong character and he is a weak one. She was putting herself outside society, inviting insult, destitution, and loneliness. She went out into a very dark night.
রবিবার, ৪ নভেম্বর, ২০১২
Ulysses
The length of Ulysses is a crucial part of Joyce's achievement, the creation of this unknown man, who is not a flat character, nor even a rounded character, but a real person. By the adjective 'real' I mean only that Joyce gives his readers more information about Bloom than any other character in the history of literature. We know him better than we know most of our friends.
Complexity and mass are the keys to Joyce's fiction, a fiction that questions cliches of every kind..
Saul Bellow in one of his interviews to 'Paris Review' strangely describes 'Ulysses' as a "masterpiece of confusion"-an eccentric opinion.
T.S. Eliot published his influential, agenda-setting essay in 1923, 'Ulysses, Order and Myth': 'Mr Joyce's parallel use of the Odyssey has a great importance. It has the importance of a scientific discovery... It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.'
Craig Raine(Introduction)
Complexity and mass are the keys to Joyce's fiction, a fiction that questions cliches of every kind..
Saul Bellow in one of his interviews to 'Paris Review' strangely describes 'Ulysses' as a "masterpiece of confusion"-an eccentric opinion.
T.S. Eliot published his influential, agenda-setting essay in 1923, 'Ulysses, Order and Myth': 'Mr Joyce's parallel use of the Odyssey has a great importance. It has the importance of a scientific discovery... It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.'
Craig Raine(Introduction)
Proteus: Intellectual Complexities
Proteus: Intellectual Complexities
Perhaps the most intellectually complex episode is in section 1, chapter3, "Proteus". Joyce scavenges the whole history of European scholastic philosophy to provide weapons for his young artist, Stephen Dedalus, in his battle to capture the transitory flux of reality.
Joyce relates this intellectual struggle to Homer's story of how King Menelaus wrestled information from the slippery only "shape-shifting" sea king, Proteus.
Bewildered by a myriad obscure references and complex patterns of language, ever shifting like the sea, the first-time reader may be tempted to give up.
A moment comes indeed when language seems to break down into meaningless misprinted shapes.
Listen: a four worded wave speech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos.
Do take Joyce's advice. Listen! For this is the miraculous moment when Stephen captures the voice of the sea itself in words of his own making- the crash of a wave and the foam retracted through the shingle.
Say it over to yourself. It is like putting a shell to your ear, as a child does to hear the sea.
Notes taken from "Introducing Joyce" by David Norris and Carl Flint
Perhaps the most intellectually complex episode is in section 1, chapter3, "Proteus". Joyce scavenges the whole history of European scholastic philosophy to provide weapons for his young artist, Stephen Dedalus, in his battle to capture the transitory flux of reality.
Joyce relates this intellectual struggle to Homer's story of how King Menelaus wrestled information from the slippery only "shape-shifting" sea king, Proteus.
Bewildered by a myriad obscure references and complex patterns of language, ever shifting like the sea, the first-time reader may be tempted to give up.
A moment comes indeed when language seems to break down into meaningless misprinted shapes.
Listen: a four worded wave speech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos.
Do take Joyce's advice. Listen! For this is the miraculous moment when Stephen captures the voice of the sea itself in words of his own making- the crash of a wave and the foam retracted through the shingle.
Say it over to yourself. It is like putting a shell to your ear, as a child does to hear the sea.
Notes taken from "Introducing Joyce" by David Norris and Carl Flint
Double Coding
Double Coding
Double Coding*Continuation of modern techniques and sth else(traditional building)
*Modern didn’t communicate effectively with its ultimate users
*Didn’t make effective link with the city and history
*Post modern architecture professionally based and popular as well
*Based on new techniques and old patterns
*Double coding simply means both-
elite/popular,new/old–and there are compelling reasons for these opposite pairings
*Post modern architects use contemporary technology as well as facing current social reality
*Yet all the creators who could be called postmodern keep sth of modern sensibility-some intention which distinguishes their work from that of revivalists-whether this is irony,parody,displacement,complexity,eclecticism,realism or any number of contemporary tactics and goals.
*Post modern double meaning:the: The continuation of modernism and its transcendence.
বৃহস্পতিবার, ১ নভেম্বর, ২০১২
Marshall McLuhan: Understanding Media -Notes from it
Marshall McLuhan is famously known for his coining the word 'Globalization'.
Here I will try to take some notes from his very essential book "Understanding Media".
(Routledge publication,1964)
The book is divided into two parts, of which the first part has seven chapters and twenty six for the second part.
The introduction begin with a report from 'The New York Times' that is of a 'small mouse' who (presumeably had been watching television) allegedly reported of attacking a little girl and her 'full grown cat' ...'Both mouse and cat survived, and the incident is recorded here as a reminder that things seem to be changing'.
The 1st chapter of the part-1 is titled as "The Medium is the Message". "Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message......machines altered our relations to one another and to ourselves"
The chapter-2 is titled as "Media Hot And Cold"
Chapter 4 is "The Gadget Lover" and subtitled 'Narcissus as Narcosis'.
'It is from the Greek word 'narcosis', or numbness...The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system'.... With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself.
Chapter-7: Challenge and Collapse
The Nemesis of Creativity
"...Archimedes once said, 'Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.' Today he would have pointed to our electric media and said, "I will stand on your eyes, your ears, your nerves, and your brain, and the world will move in any tempo or pattern I choose."
*************
Now lets go to the Part-2
Chapter 8: "The Spoken Word" Flower of Evil?
Chapter 9: The Writ Word
An Eye for an Ear
...Civilization is built on literacy because literacy is a uniform processing of a culture by a visual sense extended in space and time by the alphabet. In tribal culture, experience is arrange by a dominant auditory sense-life that represses visual values.
Chapter 11: Number
Profile of the Crowd
..In the theater, at a ball game, in church, every individual enjoys all those others present. The pleasure of being among the masses is the sense of the joy in the multiplication of numbers...
" you feel better satisfied when you use well-known brands."
Chapter12: Clothing
Our Extended Skin
... Privacy, like individualism is unknown in tribal societies, a fact that Westerners need to keep in mind when estimating the attractions of our way of life to nonliterate peoples.a.
Clothing, as an extension of the skin, can be seen both as a heat-control mechanism and as a means of defining the self socially.
Chapter13 Housing
New Look and New Outlook
If clothing is an extension of our private skins to store and channel our own heat and energy, housing is a collective means of achieving the same end for the family or the group.
... Many readers are familiar with the way in which James Joyce organized Ulysses by assigning the various city forms of walls, streets, civic buildings, and media to the various bodily organs. Such a parallel between the city and the human body enabled Joyce to establish a further parallel between ancient Ithaca and modern Dublin, creating a sense of human unity in depth, transcending history.
Baudlaire originally intended to call his "Fleurs du Mal, Les Limbes", having in mind the city as corporate extensions of our physical organs... The city as amplification of human lusts and sensual striving had for him an entire organic and psychic unity.
14) Money
The Poor Man's Credit Card
15) Clocks
The Scent of Time
18)The Printed Word
Architect of Nationalism
20) the Photograph
The Brothel-without-Walls
21) Press
Government by News Leak
22) Motorcar
The Mechanical Bride
29) Movies
The Reel World
30) Radio
The Tribal Drum
31) Television
The Timid Giant
33) Automation
Learning a Living
Here I will try to take some notes from his very essential book "Understanding Media".
(Routledge publication,1964)
The book is divided into two parts, of which the first part has seven chapters and twenty six for the second part.
The introduction begin with a report from 'The New York Times' that is of a 'small mouse' who (presumeably had been watching television) allegedly reported of attacking a little girl and her 'full grown cat' ...'Both mouse and cat survived, and the incident is recorded here as a reminder that things seem to be changing'.
The 1st chapter of the part-1 is titled as "The Medium is the Message". "Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message......machines altered our relations to one another and to ourselves"
The chapter-2 is titled as "Media Hot And Cold"
Chapter 4 is "The Gadget Lover" and subtitled 'Narcissus as Narcosis'.
'It is from the Greek word 'narcosis', or numbness...The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system'.... With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself.
Chapter-7: Challenge and Collapse
The Nemesis of Creativity
"...Archimedes once said, 'Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.' Today he would have pointed to our electric media and said, "I will stand on your eyes, your ears, your nerves, and your brain, and the world will move in any tempo or pattern I choose."
*************
Now lets go to the Part-2
Chapter 8: "The Spoken Word" Flower of Evil?
Chapter 9: The Writ Word
An Eye for an Ear
...Civilization is built on literacy because literacy is a uniform processing of a culture by a visual sense extended in space and time by the alphabet. In tribal culture, experience is arrange by a dominant auditory sense-life that represses visual values.
Chapter 11: Number
Profile of the Crowd
..In the theater, at a ball game, in church, every individual enjoys all those others present. The pleasure of being among the masses is the sense of the joy in the multiplication of numbers...
" you feel better satisfied when you use well-known brands."
Chapter12: Clothing
Our Extended Skin
... Privacy, like individualism is unknown in tribal societies, a fact that Westerners need to keep in mind when estimating the attractions of our way of life to nonliterate peoples.a.
Clothing, as an extension of the skin, can be seen both as a heat-control mechanism and as a means of defining the self socially.
Chapter13 Housing
New Look and New Outlook
If clothing is an extension of our private skins to store and channel our own heat and energy, housing is a collective means of achieving the same end for the family or the group.
... Many readers are familiar with the way in which James Joyce organized Ulysses by assigning the various city forms of walls, streets, civic buildings, and media to the various bodily organs. Such a parallel between the city and the human body enabled Joyce to establish a further parallel between ancient Ithaca and modern Dublin, creating a sense of human unity in depth, transcending history.
Baudlaire originally intended to call his "Fleurs du Mal, Les Limbes", having in mind the city as corporate extensions of our physical organs... The city as amplification of human lusts and sensual striving had for him an entire organic and psychic unity.
14) Money
The Poor Man's Credit Card
15) Clocks
The Scent of Time
18)The Printed Word
Architect of Nationalism
20) the Photograph
The Brothel-without-Walls
21) Press
Government by News Leak
22) Motorcar
The Mechanical Bride
29) Movies
The Reel World
30) Radio
The Tribal Drum
31) Television
The Timid Giant
33) Automation
Learning a Living
বুধবার, ৩১ অক্টোবর, ২০১২
The Dream that I saw on 30 November, 2012 :Explanation with the help of Freud
Spot-1
In a restaurant on a roof of a highrise building taking drinks(Even in dream I was non-alcoholic). A girl previously known to me came with her 2/3 elder relatives. Those elder women were black veiled and they were not welcoming in nature. We talked about different matters. She informed me of an upcoming important program that is with Ryan Rinkin/Ripkin(I'm not sure is there anyone named as such or any poet by this name!),a famous poet who came to Bangladesh to meet young poets and writers.
Spot-2
It was on a street I was following her but not that earlier girl in the restaurant but another transformed. She was not so beautiful but tempting.
(I now wonder of the transformation which was not caught in the dream!)
Spot-3
We were walking in a pavement in between tall tall trees in a garden where those trees were standing in an unique harmony. If a tree moved with the breeze other trees followed it. The standing of the trees in perfect line and their harmonious movement with the breeze erupted in me the definition of poetry. I found poetry to be in similitude with them. Some lines that I planned to speak in front of the poet already in shape.
Spot-4
Ryan Rinkin/Ripkin was sitting in the middle of a table rectangular in shape. The place was under open sky surrounded by some little trees may be in the tubs or planted in soil. I started speaking without any introduction or prologue of the definition of poetry that is -
Poetry is the wave that touches all the shores
Poetry is the gentle breeze which stirs all the leaves...
Then I tried to say something more but I stammered and paused, nothing was coming from hence. While I was speaking Razia Sultana Khan and Niaz Zaman whispered my name to Ryan Rinkin/Ripkin which gave me more pride and confidence while I was speaking. Ryan Rinkin/Ripkin after listening my definition gave a dubious smile which kept me in riddle whether it was approving or not. I was given some time to organize my thoughts and present again to them. So I sat in a corner with all my sheets and papers with me.
I was trying to organize my thoughts, even in my dream I was self-gratifying me for my definition. I thought it to be excellent.
After a while I felt I was dreaming, and I also felt that it was an excellent dream!
Then I came to consciousness and woke up only few minutes before sunrise.
It was November 30, 2012.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Notes on Explanation:
-I used 'spot' as I visited those spots consecutively.
1) I don't know any poet by this name Ryan Rinkin/Ripkin! I'm not sure whether anyone on earth with this name. May be its the construction of dream. In this regard if we go to Freud and his "The Mechanisms of the Dream Work"____ the first one is-
(a) Condensation:
Term used to describe partial fusion of two or more ideas, occurring particularly in dreams, and producing a characteristic type of distortion, illustrated by such works as "treaty of Breast-Litovsk"
One image can stand for many associations.. The complexity of the latent content of a dream can therefore be derived from analyzing how repressed ideas,old ideas, unrecognized ideas and unthought-out associations connect up with the condensed image that is at the forefront of the dream. The way that a single idea or event can simultaneously represent different impulses Freud calls "over-determination".
Yes I met few world famous poet personally and have contact with many. May be it infused from this?
2)Lets go to Freud again____
A dream is a fulfilled wish. "The dream is the disguised fulfillment of a forbidden or repressed wish after all."
The Dream Machine:In this episode Freud discovers that the hidden wish in dreams is often of a sexual nature in adults. The function of dreams is to discharge the tensions of repressed and forbidden wishes. May be the girl appeared tempting because of this fact?
3)In "Spot-3' I've gone through some visual images and natural objects. Lets go to Freud .What he says that dreams are of course, almost wholly visual, rather like a film. Like some bad films there often seems to be little connection between the events and images in a dream. However, as they say, every picture tells a story. In dreams, the story is hidden, and the visuals are the clue. It is termed as 'Dramatization' in Freud's dream work episode of the book "The Interpretations of Dream".
4) After waking up from the dream I started writing what I have seen. But I couldn't write as I saw in dream. In Freud's language I gave only a 'Secondary Elaboration' ('Dream Work' episode). In that episode he says that when someone wakes up they recall their dream and start to think about what it means. This starts with an interpretation, which can take you further away from the latent content.
In a restaurant on a roof of a highrise building taking drinks(Even in dream I was non-alcoholic). A girl previously known to me came with her 2/3 elder relatives. Those elder women were black veiled and they were not welcoming in nature. We talked about different matters. She informed me of an upcoming important program that is with Ryan Rinkin/Ripkin(I'm not sure is there anyone named as such or any poet by this name!),a famous poet who came to Bangladesh to meet young poets and writers.
Spot-2
It was on a street I was following her but not that earlier girl in the restaurant but another transformed. She was not so beautiful but tempting.
(I now wonder of the transformation which was not caught in the dream!)
Spot-3
We were walking in a pavement in between tall tall trees in a garden where those trees were standing in an unique harmony. If a tree moved with the breeze other trees followed it. The standing of the trees in perfect line and their harmonious movement with the breeze erupted in me the definition of poetry. I found poetry to be in similitude with them. Some lines that I planned to speak in front of the poet already in shape.
Spot-4
Ryan Rinkin/Ripkin was sitting in the middle of a table rectangular in shape. The place was under open sky surrounded by some little trees may be in the tubs or planted in soil. I started speaking without any introduction or prologue of the definition of poetry that is -
Poetry is the wave that touches all the shores
Poetry is the gentle breeze which stirs all the leaves...
Then I tried to say something more but I stammered and paused, nothing was coming from hence. While I was speaking Razia Sultana Khan and Niaz Zaman whispered my name to Ryan Rinkin/Ripkin which gave me more pride and confidence while I was speaking. Ryan Rinkin/Ripkin after listening my definition gave a dubious smile which kept me in riddle whether it was approving or not. I was given some time to organize my thoughts and present again to them. So I sat in a corner with all my sheets and papers with me.
I was trying to organize my thoughts, even in my dream I was self-gratifying me for my definition. I thought it to be excellent.
After a while I felt I was dreaming, and I also felt that it was an excellent dream!
Then I came to consciousness and woke up only few minutes before sunrise.
It was November 30, 2012.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Notes on Explanation:
-I used 'spot' as I visited those spots consecutively.
1) I don't know any poet by this name Ryan Rinkin/Ripkin! I'm not sure whether anyone on earth with this name. May be its the construction of dream. In this regard if we go to Freud and his "The Mechanisms of the Dream Work"____ the first one is-
(a) Condensation:
Term used to describe partial fusion of two or more ideas, occurring particularly in dreams, and producing a characteristic type of distortion, illustrated by such works as "treaty of Breast-Litovsk"
One image can stand for many associations.. The complexity of the latent content of a dream can therefore be derived from analyzing how repressed ideas,old ideas, unrecognized ideas and unthought-out associations connect up with the condensed image that is at the forefront of the dream. The way that a single idea or event can simultaneously represent different impulses Freud calls "over-determination".
Yes I met few world famous poet personally and have contact with many. May be it infused from this?
2)Lets go to Freud again____
A dream is a fulfilled wish. "The dream is the disguised fulfillment of a forbidden or repressed wish after all."
The Dream Machine:In this episode Freud discovers that the hidden wish in dreams is often of a sexual nature in adults. The function of dreams is to discharge the tensions of repressed and forbidden wishes. May be the girl appeared tempting because of this fact?
3)In "Spot-3' I've gone through some visual images and natural objects. Lets go to Freud .What he says that dreams are of course, almost wholly visual, rather like a film. Like some bad films there often seems to be little connection between the events and images in a dream. However, as they say, every picture tells a story. In dreams, the story is hidden, and the visuals are the clue. It is termed as 'Dramatization' in Freud's dream work episode of the book "The Interpretations of Dream".
4) After waking up from the dream I started writing what I have seen. But I couldn't write as I saw in dream. In Freud's language I gave only a 'Secondary Elaboration' ('Dream Work' episode). In that episode he says that when someone wakes up they recall their dream and start to think about what it means. This starts with an interpretation, which can take you further away from the latent content.
Why I Write? Do I have the Right to Write in this Royal Language?
I don't think I have superior language competence.
I can't drive well the train of language.
I don't have profound control on all the compartments of that train.
Yet I try to drive, yet I try to move upfront-
I can't drive well the train of language.
I don't have profound control on all the compartments of that train.
Yet I try to drive, yet I try to move upfront-
The Poem Recited in Dream, Drafted in Shidlai and Edited in Lalbagh
Poetry is the wave that touches all the shores
Its the gentle breeze which stires all the leaves.
Poetry is the beautiful dream which we dream after years.
Poetry is an enchantment which we follow blindly.
Its the gentle breeze which stires all the leaves.
Poetry is the beautiful dream which we dream after years.
Poetry is an enchantment which we follow blindly.
বৃহস্পতিবার, ২৫ অক্টোবর, ২০১২
Ill-fit Teaching Method in Bangladesh: What Should be the Real Method
In most of the cases teachers stay in the podium and the students listen to him with humble submission. The students in most of the cases have nothing to contribute, nothing to say, and even though they were given chance to ask question in some classes at the end the students remain demotivated or simply not interested to talk. So it's the one man show most of the time. Its not an appropriate system. Rather I think person to person method is more appropriate. The method I'm proposing is that the teacher will have direct relationship with a student or some students. He will take intensive care of the students. There he will not work as a boss only, he will be their friend, he will be their guide, he will be their comrade.
It was not a new practice I'm proposing in our region. It was an age old tradition.
In modern system while a student do his/her PhD study under the surveillance of a senior and experienced teacher and he/she has to maintain a close personal relation as the necessity demand. If this can be followed in higher level, why not in the junior level?
In our university there is a new hotchpotch system called 'Tutorial System' which isn't coming into good use as the faulty semester system is not helping.
It was not a new practice I'm proposing in our region. It was an age old tradition.
In modern system while a student do his/her PhD study under the surveillance of a senior and experienced teacher and he/she has to maintain a close personal relation as the necessity demand. If this can be followed in higher level, why not in the junior level?
In our university there is a new hotchpotch system called 'Tutorial System' which isn't coming into good use as the faulty semester system is not helping.
বুধবার, ২৪ অক্টোবর, ২০১২
Conversation With Myself
Take care of your health, you are given this wealth to use for the greater purposes
But don't gratify its hunger all the time.
Be a driver of that car but not be driven only.
Its a great autocrat, rule it or otherwise you will be ruled hard.
But don't gratify its hunger all the time.
Be a driver of that car but not be driven only.
Its a great autocrat, rule it or otherwise you will be ruled hard.
মঙ্গলবার, ২৩ অক্টোবর, ২০১২
Geeta: Timeless Wisdom
Geeta is one of the most read, revered holy text of Hindu religion. It has such eternal lines from everyone can gather timeless wisdom. Geeta is sung by Krishna to Arjuna, the great Pandava warrior and cousin of Krishna, the avatar. Arjuna was hesitant to shed blood against his own family, own cousin the Kourabs who were in the opposite fronts and caused great problems, dishonour and disgrace to the Pandavas. Krishna by singing this song to his favorite disciple, brought him again to his true self ,the true duty of a Khastriya.
Arjuna, then led to the demolition of Kourabs in the Kurukshetra being sparked with the spirited songs of Krishna.
This eternal lines will give light to the ages ahead. Here are some of the beautiful lines.---
"By dhyana,some reach the atman,some by gyana,and others by the way of karma.Yet others are ignorant of these three paths,and they resort to worship."
Free yourself from attachment to what you do;make no anxious difference between success and failure. Act! Act in purity,act serenely:even-mindedness is yoga; detachment and skill are yoga.
The wise who have yoked their intelligence are freed from the bonds of birth. They reach Brahman,the sorrowless state.
Arjuna, then led to the demolition of Kourabs in the Kurukshetra being sparked with the spirited songs of Krishna.
This eternal lines will give light to the ages ahead. Here are some of the beautiful lines.---
"By dhyana,some reach the atman,some by gyana,and others by the way of karma.Yet others are ignorant of these three paths,and they resort to worship."
Free yourself from attachment to what you do;make no anxious difference between success and failure. Act! Act in purity,act serenely:even-mindedness is yoga; detachment and skill are yoga.
The wise who have yoked their intelligence are freed from the bonds of birth. They reach Brahman,the sorrowless state.
Sunil Ganguli : The Demise of Great Superstar in Bangla Literature
The fall of another superstar in bangla literature! Sunil Ganguli, bangla literature will miss your presence. I heard the tragic news from renowned Bangladeshi poet Obayed Akash, while today I went to meet him and had some talk and tete. He brought the news before us and it took some time to cope with the weight of the situation the news created!
I am a good fan of his poetry but I'm not sure whether he is a good prose writer and has excellent narrative style and story telling.
Yet he was a great friend of Bangladesh and Bangladeshi literatis, we all must be grateful to him. He was in good terms with most of the Bangladeshi literatis and specially Humayun Ahmed, the most popular writer and story teller of Bangladesh.
In the time of liberation war when the American poet Allen Gingsberg visited the refugee camps and wrote the immortal poem "September on Jessore Road", Sunil was guide and companion of that rebel poet who could draw global attention with his poem.
He was such a prolific writer and wrote in various genre. He will stay in the heart of the millions in years to come.
Good bye Sunil! May your soul rest in peace!
I am a good fan of his poetry but I'm not sure whether he is a good prose writer and has excellent narrative style and story telling.
Yet he was a great friend of Bangladesh and Bangladeshi literatis, we all must be grateful to him. He was in good terms with most of the Bangladeshi literatis and specially Humayun Ahmed, the most popular writer and story teller of Bangladesh.
In the time of liberation war when the American poet Allen Gingsberg visited the refugee camps and wrote the immortal poem "September on Jessore Road", Sunil was guide and companion of that rebel poet who could draw global attention with his poem.
He was such a prolific writer and wrote in various genre. He will stay in the heart of the millions in years to come.
Good bye Sunil! May your soul rest in peace!
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization-Notes
Foucault gave us the term transdiscursive, which describes how, for example, Foucault is not simply an author of a book, but the author of a theory, tradition or discipline.
We can at least say that he was the instigator of a method of historical inquiry which has had major effects on the study of subjectivity, power, knowledge, discourse, history, sexuality, madness, the penal system and much else. Hence the term, "Focaldian".
Foucault's Project
Foucault sought to account for the way in which human beings have 'historically' become the subject and object of political, scientific, economic, philosophical, legal and social discourses and practices.
But Foucault does not take the idea of subjectivity in philosophical isolation. It becomes linked with- and even produced by knowledge and power through-dividing practices where, for example, psychiatry divides the mad from the sane.
Scientific classification: where science classifies the individual as the subject of life (biology), labour(economics) and language(linguistics).
Subjectification: the way the individual turns himself into a subject of health, sexuality, conduct, etc.
Hegel was one of the many by whom he was inspired-
Hegel thought that what is real is rational, and that the truth is "the whole"-one great, complex system which he called the Absolute. He believed that 'Mind' or 'Spirit' was the ultimate reality. Mind has an ever-expanding consciousness of itself, and philosophy allows us to develop self-awareness of the whole and free ourselves from the 'unreason' and contradiction of partial knowledge.
"Reason is the Sovereign of the World...the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process." (Hegel)
Foucault was not rejecting 'reason' as such, but he did refuse to see it as a 'way out' or inevitable outcome of history. His engagement with philosophy is not to provide a system for the conditions in which knowledge or truth is possible or reliable(as Kant did), but to examine what reason's historical effects are, where its limits lie, and what price it exacts.
Madness and Civilization(1964)
Madness and Civilization was not a view of the history of madness from a psychiatrist's standpoint.
"This would assume that madness was a constant, negative objective fact-in other words, an account of madness from the point of view of "scientific" reason."
Later Foucault said his object was "knowledge invested in the complex system of institutions". Authorities, their practices and opinions would be studied to show madness not as a scientific or theoretical discourse, but as a regular daily practice.
"We must try to return in history to that "zero point" in the course of madness when it was suddenly separated from reason-both in the 'confinement' of the insane and in the conceptual 'isolation' of madness from reason, as 'unreason'.
The Classical Era:
Foucault refers to the "classical era" of the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe to show that madness is an object of perception within a "social space" which is structured in different ways throughout history. Madness is an object of perception produced by social practices, rather than simply an object of thought or sensibility which could be analyzed.
There are four historical phases and distinct perceptions of madness. Let's look at these:
1. Medieval Madness and Death
2. Renaissance Folly
3. The Classical Age of Confinement
4. 1900 and Freud the Divine
#1. Medieval Madness and Death
In this medieval period-the middle ages-man's dispute with madness was a drama in which all the secrets of the world were at stake. The experience of madness was clouded by images of the Fall, God's will, the Beast, the end of time and the world.
2.Renaissance Folly
Madness comes to the fore in the late 15th century.
Man's life is no longer mad on account of the inevitability of death, but because death lies at the heart of life itself.
3.The Classical Age of Confinement
The classical age( roughly 1650-1800) reduced to silence the madness that the Renaissance had given imaginary freedom. It was contained and bound to reason, to morals and rights. Confinement was the practice then.
Old, empty Leper houses were used for a new purpose-to confine. The age of reason banged up the insane as well as the poor.
Bourgeois Morals: In fact, the confinement had more to do with economic problems of unemployment, idleness and begging. A new ethic of work and new ideas of moral obligation were now linked to civil law. Work was redemption. Idleness was rebellion. Beggars were often shot by archers at the city gates.
Treated like animals:The confinement wasn't inspired by a desire to punish or correct-simply to discipline and sever.So d insane had a beast-like existence behind bars,chained to walls n gnawed by rats.
Reform,Asylums n capture of minds
4. 1900 and Freud the Divine
Personalities like Freud silenced condemnation of madness.He abolished 'regimes of silence' that reformers had employed. He made the mad talk.
We can at least say that he was the instigator of a method of historical inquiry which has had major effects on the study of subjectivity, power, knowledge, discourse, history, sexuality, madness, the penal system and much else. Hence the term, "Focaldian".
Foucault's Project
Foucault sought to account for the way in which human beings have 'historically' become the subject and object of political, scientific, economic, philosophical, legal and social discourses and practices.
But Foucault does not take the idea of subjectivity in philosophical isolation. It becomes linked with- and even produced by knowledge and power through-dividing practices where, for example, psychiatry divides the mad from the sane.
Scientific classification: where science classifies the individual as the subject of life (biology), labour(economics) and language(linguistics).
Subjectification: the way the individual turns himself into a subject of health, sexuality, conduct, etc.
Hegel was one of the many by whom he was inspired-
Hegel thought that what is real is rational, and that the truth is "the whole"-one great, complex system which he called the Absolute. He believed that 'Mind' or 'Spirit' was the ultimate reality. Mind has an ever-expanding consciousness of itself, and philosophy allows us to develop self-awareness of the whole and free ourselves from the 'unreason' and contradiction of partial knowledge.
"Reason is the Sovereign of the World...the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process." (Hegel)
Foucault was not rejecting 'reason' as such, but he did refuse to see it as a 'way out' or inevitable outcome of history. His engagement with philosophy is not to provide a system for the conditions in which knowledge or truth is possible or reliable(as Kant did), but to examine what reason's historical effects are, where its limits lie, and what price it exacts.
Madness and Civilization(1964)
Madness and Civilization was not a view of the history of madness from a psychiatrist's standpoint.
"This would assume that madness was a constant, negative objective fact-in other words, an account of madness from the point of view of "scientific" reason."
Later Foucault said his object was "knowledge invested in the complex system of institutions". Authorities, their practices and opinions would be studied to show madness not as a scientific or theoretical discourse, but as a regular daily practice.
"We must try to return in history to that "zero point" in the course of madness when it was suddenly separated from reason-both in the 'confinement' of the insane and in the conceptual 'isolation' of madness from reason, as 'unreason'.
The Classical Era:
Foucault refers to the "classical era" of the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe to show that madness is an object of perception within a "social space" which is structured in different ways throughout history. Madness is an object of perception produced by social practices, rather than simply an object of thought or sensibility which could be analyzed.
There are four historical phases and distinct perceptions of madness. Let's look at these:
1. Medieval Madness and Death
2. Renaissance Folly
3. The Classical Age of Confinement
4. 1900 and Freud the Divine
#1. Medieval Madness and Death
In this medieval period-the middle ages-man's dispute with madness was a drama in which all the secrets of the world were at stake. The experience of madness was clouded by images of the Fall, God's will, the Beast, the end of time and the world.
2.Renaissance Folly
Madness comes to the fore in the late 15th century.
Man's life is no longer mad on account of the inevitability of death, but because death lies at the heart of life itself.
3.The Classical Age of Confinement
The classical age( roughly 1650-1800) reduced to silence the madness that the Renaissance had given imaginary freedom. It was contained and bound to reason, to morals and rights. Confinement was the practice then.
Old, empty Leper houses were used for a new purpose-to confine. The age of reason banged up the insane as well as the poor.
Bourgeois Morals: In fact, the confinement had more to do with economic problems of unemployment, idleness and begging. A new ethic of work and new ideas of moral obligation were now linked to civil law. Work was redemption. Idleness was rebellion. Beggars were often shot by archers at the city gates.
Treated like animals:The confinement wasn't inspired by a desire to punish or correct-simply to discipline and sever.So d insane had a beast-like existence behind bars,chained to walls n gnawed by rats.
Reform,Asylums n capture of minds
4. 1900 and Freud the Divine
Personalities like Freud silenced condemnation of madness.He abolished 'regimes of silence' that reformers had employed. He made the mad talk.
শনিবার, ২০ অক্টোবর, ২০১২
Lacan, the Mirror Image and Others
One of the main influences on the early Lacan, in the 1920s and 1930s were the Surrealists, then in their heyday. Many Surrealists were interested in psychoanalysis, including Salvador Dali, who met both Freud and Lacan. Lacan had noticed that the meanings patients attach to words are often fluid and seem to be attached to images, while meaning is Surrealist art is also attached to images.
In the first phase of his work Lacan stressed the role of images and the imaginary in the workings of the human mind. He had been particularly struck by Lorenz's famous experiment with ducks. Lorenz had put his Wellington boots next to duck eggs. As the ducklings hatched out and saw the boot, they became 'imprinted' with its image; wherever that boot went, the little ducks would follow. They mistook Lorenz's boot for their mummy. When Lorenz wore his Wellingtons he was slavishly followed by a trail of ducklings, each of whom were captivated by the image of the boot.
In the same way, a man might love a woman who looked, smelt or sounded like his mother, because he is captivated by an image of her. The idea of 'domination by the image' is for Lacan tied to the concept of captivation, slavery or bondage. Such a bond can exist between a child and mother, between lovers or between slave and a master.
'Subject' and 'signifier' are an important pair of binary opposites in Lacan's theory of the subject. His theory of the subject is, very simply, a theory of what it means to be a person. He argued that we are represented by language, by special objects called 'words'. Lacan's technical term for 'word' is 'signifier'.
Person~Subject
Word~ Signifier
He argued that the signifiers that a subject speaks, writes or dreams, represent that subject.
Or, in Lacan's terms; 'the signifier represents the subject...'
Theory of the Mirror Phase...
Humans are born prematurely. Left to themselves, they would probably die. They are always born too early. They can't walk or talk at birth: they have a very partial mastery of their motor functions and, at the biological level, they are hardly complete.
So how does the child come to master its relation to its body? How does it respond to its "prematuration"?
Lacan's answer is in the theory of the mirror phase. He draws our attention, in later texts, to an ethological curiosity, known as "mimicry".
In the first phase of his work Lacan stressed the role of images and the imaginary in the workings of the human mind. He had been particularly struck by Lorenz's famous experiment with ducks. Lorenz had put his Wellington boots next to duck eggs. As the ducklings hatched out and saw the boot, they became 'imprinted' with its image; wherever that boot went, the little ducks would follow. They mistook Lorenz's boot for their mummy. When Lorenz wore his Wellingtons he was slavishly followed by a trail of ducklings, each of whom were captivated by the image of the boot.
In the same way, a man might love a woman who looked, smelt or sounded like his mother, because he is captivated by an image of her. The idea of 'domination by the image' is for Lacan tied to the concept of captivation, slavery or bondage. Such a bond can exist between a child and mother, between lovers or between slave and a master.
'Subject' and 'signifier' are an important pair of binary opposites in Lacan's theory of the subject. His theory of the subject is, very simply, a theory of what it means to be a person. He argued that we are represented by language, by special objects called 'words'. Lacan's technical term for 'word' is 'signifier'.
Person~Subject
Word~ Signifier
He argued that the signifiers that a subject speaks, writes or dreams, represent that subject.
Or, in Lacan's terms; 'the signifier represents the subject...'
Theory of the Mirror Phase...
Humans are born prematurely. Left to themselves, they would probably die. They are always born too early. They can't walk or talk at birth: they have a very partial mastery of their motor functions and, at the biological level, they are hardly complete.
So how does the child come to master its relation to its body? How does it respond to its "prematuration"?
Lacan's answer is in the theory of the mirror phase. He draws our attention, in later texts, to an ethological curiosity, known as "mimicry".
Joyce and Ulysses
Joyce had a musical ear and the sound of prose was always extremely important to him. A golden rule for the reader is 'when in doubt,read aloud'.
Language was his raw material,and he applied to it the kind of extreme tests and standards more usually expected of poetry.
He displayed the same standards of integrity in dealing with his subject matter, an uncompromising realist writing of areas of human experience previously regarded as too mean,too personal,too intimate or too risque to be made the subject of art.
In particular,he blew away the cobwebs surrounding the Victorian treatment of sexuality and presented it in an honest manner that was revolutionary.In doing so,he heroically expanded the frontiers of human spiritual development.
Joyce,above all else, is the quintessential modernist recorder of city life.
Despite his love for the city,Joyce was ruthlessly unsentimental about it.
"If Dublin were ever to be destroyed, it could be rebuilt from the pages of my works."
-Well,the boast is not strictly true. There is very little architectural detail of the city in Joyce's writings. He was more interested in the lives of Dublin's citizens than the building which housed them. It was the moral and psychological landscape of the town that fascinated him.
Joyce wrote to an Italian critic Carlo Linati, for an outline of his intention in writing Ullysses.."It is an epic of two races(Israelite-Irish) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day."
Homer's Odyssey:
To enjoy Joyce's Ulysses, the reader does not need a profound scholarly knowledge of Homer's epic, The Odyssey, Latinized as Ulysses. An acquaintance with Homer's epic will certainly sharpen one's appreciation of Joyce's modern version, and it is essential to be at least familiar with an outline of Homer's original.
Odysseus was one of the Greek heroes who besieged and finally captured the city of Troy, a revenge for the adulterous elopement of Helen, wife of King Menelaus, with Paris, prince of Troy.
Odysseus suffered 10 years' delay in returning home to Ithaca, his punishment for having offended the sea god Poseidon. Thanks to his renowned cunning, Odysseus survived all the detours and perilous adventures that Poseidon inflicted on him. Odysseus encountered man-eating giants, the witch Circe who changed men into pigs, monsters, clashing rocks and whirlpools, and even traveled to the underworld of Hades to speak with the dead.
Meanwhile, at home, his wife Penelope who faithfully awaits his return, is being courted by 120 princes, each hoping to marry her and take the throne. The princes plot to murder Telemachus, son of Odysseus, when he returns from searching for his father.
Odysseus finally reaches home and in disguise kills all the suitors who have settled in his palace, drunk his wine, devoured his cattle and seduced his maid-servants..
Comic Translations::
Joyce makes 1904 Dublin the adventurous geography through which his Odysseus/Ulysses wanders. Whom did Joyce choose to play the role of modern Ulysses? He cast an ordinary, mild salesman, Leopold Bloom, a Jewish "alien" to play the central role in a deeply Irish book. Bloom is the modern-day, comic, realist anti-hero"translations" of the epic hero Odysseus.
There are many other character"translations" paralleling Homer's original
Where is the resolution in Ulysses?
Stephen Dedalus,the Telemachus in search of a father, finds a surrogate Bloom's paternal kindness-an encounter which occurs in a brothel and is in any case temporary, not a resolution.
Bloom is a married cuckold who releases his sexual tension by masturbating on Sandymount Strand, winding up at last upside-down in bed beside a wife with whom he has not had full sexual relations for nearly a dozen years. This too is hardly a conventionally resolved "happy ending". The resolution is a humanly "Imperfect" circle.
It can be seen that Bloom and Molly share in an unorthodox form of communion. Throughout his day of journeying, Bloom's reveries remained anchored in Molly, and she at the end responds faithfully to him in her own thoughts. There is genuinely shared feeling, communion and reconciliation between them, far beyond the mechanical squirt of sperm.
Joyce is saying, life can be affirmed; it can never be absolutely resolved.
The whole present action of this very long novel takes place in some eighteen hours.
It has more plot in its one day than writers previously thought to include as relevant to action.
Further, the novel follows, in a generally alternating way, two characters on their daily round in Dublin. One is the same Stephen Dedalus of A Portrait of the Artist, now two years older, thinking of quitting his lodgings, leaving his job as a schoolteacher and perhaps abandoning Ireland for good. The other principal character is an advertising canvasser named Leopold Bloom. During the day Bloom pursues his job in a desultory sort of way, but mainly his mind is on his domestic situation, for he has discovered that his wife has arranged an assignation with another man for that very afternoon.
tempted to give up.
A moment comes indeed when language seems to break down into meaningless misprinted shapes.
Listen: a four worded wave speech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, oos.
Do take Joyce's advice. Listen! For this is the miraculous moment when Stephen captures the voice of the sea itself in words of his own making-the crash of a wave and the foam retracted through the shingle.
Say it over to yourself. It is like putting a shell to your ear, as a child does to hear the sea.
Stream of Consciousness
Joyce perfected a stream of consciousness technique which imitates the way the mind "speaks" to itself- in complex fluid patterns, random interruptions, incomplete thoughts, half words and so on. Joyce claimed to have developed his technique from a forgotten French novel, "Less Laurlers sont coupes" by Edouard Dujardin, picked up in a railway kiosk.
Joyce strongly disagreed with those who believed that his stream of consciousness had been borrowed from Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical theory of the unconscious.
Other writers at the time were developing similar ideas of the "inner mind". Virginia Woolf(1882-1941) describes a modernist practice of writing that fits Joyce's innovative technique in Ulysses.
Perhaps the most intellectually complex episode is in section 1, chapter 3, "Proteus". Joyce scavenges the whole history of European scholastic philosophy to provide weapons for his young artist, Stephen Dedalus, in his battle to capture the transitory flux of reality.
Joyce relates this intellectual struggle to Homer's story of how King Menelaus wrestled information from the slippery old "shape-shifting" sea king, Proteus.
Bewildered by a myriad obscure references and complex patterns of language, ever shifting like the sea, the first-time reader may be
Resolution or Affirmation?
In comic novels-in Jane Austen's, for instance-we can expect that complications and misunderstanding always lead finally to harmony and resolution in marriage-the traditional "happy ending". Where is the resolution in Ulysees?
Stephen Dedalus, the Telemachus in search of a father, finds a surrogate in Bloom's paternal kindness-an encounter which occurs in a brothel and is in any case temporary, not a resolution.
Bloom is a married cuckold who releases his sexual tension by masturbating .
Joyce is saying,life can be affirmed; it can never be absolutely resolved.
Language was his raw material,and he applied to it the kind of extreme tests and standards more usually expected of poetry.
He displayed the same standards of integrity in dealing with his subject matter, an uncompromising realist writing of areas of human experience previously regarded as too mean,too personal,too intimate or too risque to be made the subject of art.
In particular,he blew away the cobwebs surrounding the Victorian treatment of sexuality and presented it in an honest manner that was revolutionary.In doing so,he heroically expanded the frontiers of human spiritual development.
Joyce,above all else, is the quintessential modernist recorder of city life.
Despite his love for the city,Joyce was ruthlessly unsentimental about it.
"If Dublin were ever to be destroyed, it could be rebuilt from the pages of my works."
-Well,the boast is not strictly true. There is very little architectural detail of the city in Joyce's writings. He was more interested in the lives of Dublin's citizens than the building which housed them. It was the moral and psychological landscape of the town that fascinated him.
Joyce wrote to an Italian critic Carlo Linati, for an outline of his intention in writing Ullysses.."It is an epic of two races(Israelite-Irish) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day."
Homer's Odyssey:
To enjoy Joyce's Ulysses, the reader does not need a profound scholarly knowledge of Homer's epic, The Odyssey, Latinized as Ulysses. An acquaintance with Homer's epic will certainly sharpen one's appreciation of Joyce's modern version, and it is essential to be at least familiar with an outline of Homer's original.
Odysseus was one of the Greek heroes who besieged and finally captured the city of Troy, a revenge for the adulterous elopement of Helen, wife of King Menelaus, with Paris, prince of Troy.
Odysseus suffered 10 years' delay in returning home to Ithaca, his punishment for having offended the sea god Poseidon. Thanks to his renowned cunning, Odysseus survived all the detours and perilous adventures that Poseidon inflicted on him. Odysseus encountered man-eating giants, the witch Circe who changed men into pigs, monsters, clashing rocks and whirlpools, and even traveled to the underworld of Hades to speak with the dead.
Meanwhile, at home, his wife Penelope who faithfully awaits his return, is being courted by 120 princes, each hoping to marry her and take the throne. The princes plot to murder Telemachus, son of Odysseus, when he returns from searching for his father.
Odysseus finally reaches home and in disguise kills all the suitors who have settled in his palace, drunk his wine, devoured his cattle and seduced his maid-servants..
Comic Translations::
Joyce makes 1904 Dublin the adventurous geography through which his Odysseus/Ulysses wanders. Whom did Joyce choose to play the role of modern Ulysses? He cast an ordinary, mild salesman, Leopold Bloom, a Jewish "alien" to play the central role in a deeply Irish book. Bloom is the modern-day, comic, realist anti-hero"translations" of the epic hero Odysseus.
There are many other character"translations" paralleling Homer's original
Where is the resolution in Ulysses?
Stephen Dedalus,the Telemachus in search of a father, finds a surrogate Bloom's paternal kindness-an encounter which occurs in a brothel and is in any case temporary, not a resolution.
Bloom is a married cuckold who releases his sexual tension by masturbating on Sandymount Strand, winding up at last upside-down in bed beside a wife with whom he has not had full sexual relations for nearly a dozen years. This too is hardly a conventionally resolved "happy ending". The resolution is a humanly "Imperfect" circle.
It can be seen that Bloom and Molly share in an unorthodox form of communion. Throughout his day of journeying, Bloom's reveries remained anchored in Molly, and she at the end responds faithfully to him in her own thoughts. There is genuinely shared feeling, communion and reconciliation between them, far beyond the mechanical squirt of sperm.
Joyce is saying, life can be affirmed; it can never be absolutely resolved.
The whole present action of this very long novel takes place in some eighteen hours.
It has more plot in its one day than writers previously thought to include as relevant to action.
Further, the novel follows, in a generally alternating way, two characters on their daily round in Dublin. One is the same Stephen Dedalus of A Portrait of the Artist, now two years older, thinking of quitting his lodgings, leaving his job as a schoolteacher and perhaps abandoning Ireland for good. The other principal character is an advertising canvasser named Leopold Bloom. During the day Bloom pursues his job in a desultory sort of way, but mainly his mind is on his domestic situation, for he has discovered that his wife has arranged an assignation with another man for that very afternoon.
tempted to give up.
A moment comes indeed when language seems to break down into meaningless misprinted shapes.
Listen: a four worded wave speech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, oos.
Do take Joyce's advice. Listen! For this is the miraculous moment when Stephen captures the voice of the sea itself in words of his own making-the crash of a wave and the foam retracted through the shingle.
Say it over to yourself. It is like putting a shell to your ear, as a child does to hear the sea.
Stream of Consciousness
Joyce perfected a stream of consciousness technique which imitates the way the mind "speaks" to itself- in complex fluid patterns, random interruptions, incomplete thoughts, half words and so on. Joyce claimed to have developed his technique from a forgotten French novel, "Less Laurlers sont coupes" by Edouard Dujardin, picked up in a railway kiosk.
Joyce strongly disagreed with those who believed that his stream of consciousness had been borrowed from Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical theory of the unconscious.
Other writers at the time were developing similar ideas of the "inner mind". Virginia Woolf(1882-1941) describes a modernist practice of writing that fits Joyce's innovative technique in Ulysses.
Perhaps the most intellectually complex episode is in section 1, chapter 3, "Proteus". Joyce scavenges the whole history of European scholastic philosophy to provide weapons for his young artist, Stephen Dedalus, in his battle to capture the transitory flux of reality.
Joyce relates this intellectual struggle to Homer's story of how King Menelaus wrestled information from the slippery old "shape-shifting" sea king, Proteus.
Bewildered by a myriad obscure references and complex patterns of language, ever shifting like the sea, the first-time reader may be
Resolution or Affirmation?
In comic novels-in Jane Austen's, for instance-we can expect that complications and misunderstanding always lead finally to harmony and resolution in marriage-the traditional "happy ending". Where is the resolution in Ulysees?
Stephen Dedalus, the Telemachus in search of a father, finds a surrogate in Bloom's paternal kindness-an encounter which occurs in a brothel and is in any case temporary, not a resolution.
Bloom is a married cuckold who releases his sexual tension by masturbating .
Joyce is saying,life can be affirmed; it can never be absolutely resolved.
Jacques Derrida, Differance and Deconstruction
Few philosophers, in the latter half of the twentieth century, so profoundly and radically transformed our understanding of writing, reading, texts, and textuality as Jacques Derrida.
The scope of Derrida's thinking is prodigious. It explores with extraordinary inventiveness and originality some of the most pressing practical and theoretical challenges of recent times, in philosophy, politics, ethics, literary theory, criticism, psychoanalysis, legal theory, and much else besides; it articulates a fresh and rigorous account of the complex cultural, philosophical, and religious legacy of the west, its achievements and its silences, its exclusions and unfulfilled promises; and it develops a new style of reading scrupulously adjusted to the general implications and intricate singularity of philosophical and literary texts, to their relevance within the history of thought and the question of their enduring but always fragile future.
A student movement that swept across Europe was nearly succeeded to overthrow the government supported by the Marxists, but were eventually subdued in the 60s. Failing to demolish state power, they became disillusioned, inward-looking. Suddenly exhibiting a postmodern skepticism of grand myths such as Marxism and Communism, they began to commit themselves to language itself. Disengaging themselves from politics, they became linguistic revolutionaries, finding revolution in terms of speech, and began to view literature, reading and writing as subversive political acts in themselves. Intellectuals began attending to how words mean more than what they mean. Increasingly distrustful of language claiming to convey only single authoritarian message-they began exploring how words can say many different meanings simultaneously.
But by the time all this had taken place in France, Jacques Derrida had emerged, in the late 1960s in America, as the most avant-garde of the avant-garde. At his lecture given at the Johns Hopkins University in 1966, "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", he had caused a stir in American academia. His thought struck a new chord that caused many previous philosophers to be reassessed, and it set the tone for much thought to come. It was something of a disharmonious chord,for his forte was a subversive mode of reading authoritarian texts, or any texts. This style of reading came to be known as deconstruction. Then in France deconstruction, kicking existentialism aside, was suddenly much in vogue. Derrida became the philosopher of the day, the new 'enfant terrible', the new philosopher punk, of French intellectalism.
If Derrida has managed to turn much of Western thought on its head, he has done so only by standing on the shoulders of Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger and Saussure.
Derrida shares with Nietzsche a skepticism about philosophy in general, but especially its style, and its truth claims. Both of them write in a style that emphasises the dance of thought on the playground of knowledge- a dance that is playful, waltzing between extremes such as absolute certainty and absolute doubt.
The word "deconstruction" comes from the German philosopher Martin Heideggar's(1889-1976) concept of 'Destruktion', his call for the loosening up of the old tradition of ontology-the study of ultimate Rock Bottom Reality-through an exposure of its internal development.
What is Deconstruction?
Defining deconstruction is an activity that goes against the whole thrust of Derrida's thought. Yet we can say-
Deconstruction often involves a way of reading that concerns itself with decentering-with unmasking the problematic nature of all centers.
According to Derrida, all western thought is based on the idea of a center-an Origin, a Truth, an Ideal Form, a Fixed Point, an Immovable Mover, an Essence, a God, a Presence, which is usually capitalized, and guarantees all meaning.
For instance for 2000 years much of Western culture has been centered on the idea of Christianity and Christ.
The problem with centers, for Derrida, is that they attempt to exclude. In doing so they ignore, repress or marginalize others(which become the Other).
In male-dominated societies, man is central( and woman is the marginalized Other, repressed, ignored, pushed to the margins).
If you have a culture which has Christ in the center of its icons, then Christians will be central to that culture, and Buddhists, Muslims, Jews-anybody different-will be in the margins-marginalized-pushed to the outside. (We must remember that Derrida was born into an assimilated Jewish family in Algiers, growing up as a member of a marginalized, dispossessed culture.)
so the longing for a center spawns 'binary opposites', with one term of the opposition central and the other marginal. Furthermore, centers want to fix, or freeze the play of binary opposites.
According to Derrida we have no access to reality except through concepts, codes and categories, and the human mind functions by forming conceptual pairs.
According to Derrida we have no access to reality except through concepts, codes and categories, and the human mind functions by forming conceptual pairs. Icons with Christ or Buddha or whatever in the center try to tell us that what is in the center is the only reality. All other views are repressed. Drawing such an icon is an attempt to freeze the play of opposites between, for example, Christian/Jew or Christian/pagan. The Jew and the pagan are not even represented in such art. But icons are just one of the social practices that try to freeze the play of opposites-there are many more-such as advertising, social codes, taboos, conventions, categories, rituals, etc. But reality and language are not as simple and singular as icons with a central, exclusive image in their middle-they are more like ambiguous figures.
Derrida says that all of Western thought behaves in the same way, forming pairs of binary opposites in which one member of the pair is privileged, freezing the play of the system, and marginalising the other member of the pair.
Deconstruction is a tactic of decentering, a way of reading, which first makes us aware of the centrality of the central term. Then it attempts to subvert the central term so that the marginalized term can become central. The marginalized term temporarily overthrows the hierarchy.
Differance::
Derrida employs a whole series of such playful inventions:
pharmakon - poison/antidote (in his reading of Plato )
hymen - virginity/ consummation; inner/outer ( in his reading of Mallarme)
supplement - surplus/ necessary addition ( in his reading of Rousseau)
Difference(with an e) is crucial for Derrida because it was an important concept for those thinkers who influenced Derrida- Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl and Heidegger. It was especially important, however, for Ferdinand de Saussure for whom language as a system of differences is an important concept in structural linguistics. In his 'Course in General Linguistics' Saussure asserts that language is based on 'relation'-that words produce meanings because they are elements in a system of differences. In this system there are no positive elements-no element that can be called simply 'itself'.
Differance includes the meaning of differing, of being different from something else.
Yet differance includes not only the meaning 'to differ'-to be different from something else-but to defer, to delay, to put off till later.
Any attempt to define differance, which is not a contradiction. For like Derrida's other hinge mechanisms (pharmakon, supplement, hymen,etc.) it is ambiguous. Its play hinges on at least two meanings.
Yet, no meaning of differance ever arrives, because it is always already suspended between two meanings: "to differ" and "to defer"-without ever settling into one or the other.
And if the meaning of differance is (n)either "to defer" (n) or "to differ"-then there is no stable meaning that can ground it in the present-that can stabilize its shape-shifting. It will always dance around like a trickster. It can never be reduced to any one meaning at any one time. If there were some stable presence or meaning that could fix the meaning-the entire "philosophy" which hinges on 'differance' would be in error, and would not need pivotal, hinge mechanisms such as 'pharmakon,hymen, supplement' and 'differance'.
But if 'differance' is such a key "non-word" or "non-concept"-and if it is so important in literary studies-then it must-by this time- have degenerated into a kind of buzz word that could be applied to just about situation.
It is important to note that these terms arise out of the specific books Derrida is reading, wherein they perform very specific tasks, and are not meant to be imported into and applied to other texts, though you wouldn't probably get thrown in jail for using 'pharmakon', for instance, in a literary analysis.
*But why does Derrida spell 'differance' with an "a"-'ance'?
'Differance' in French is spelled the same as in English-with an -'ence'. Derrida intentionally misspells it as 'differance' (with an 'ance') as if it made no 'difference'-because after all-he is delivering a speech-and a speech is supposed to be more effective than writing in communicating the speaker's meaning. But is it? After all, when spoken, you cannot tell the difference between the "e" and the "a"-difference and differance sound the same in French.
*One can tell the differance between difference and differance only in writing!
When spoken the differance is lost. Thus (the) differance can be seen, but not heard. You could say that this is writing's revenge upon speech for having been marginalised.
So whether Derrida says 'difference' or 'differance' in his speech, the audience does not know the 'difference'. A simple "meaning'' of differance can never arrive-it is always suspended-playing between differing and deferring-and this suspension creates a kind of 'interval' or 'blank' in space and time that underlies all cases of differing.
The scope of Derrida's thinking is prodigious. It explores with extraordinary inventiveness and originality some of the most pressing practical and theoretical challenges of recent times, in philosophy, politics, ethics, literary theory, criticism, psychoanalysis, legal theory, and much else besides; it articulates a fresh and rigorous account of the complex cultural, philosophical, and religious legacy of the west, its achievements and its silences, its exclusions and unfulfilled promises; and it develops a new style of reading scrupulously adjusted to the general implications and intricate singularity of philosophical and literary texts, to their relevance within the history of thought and the question of their enduring but always fragile future.
A student movement that swept across Europe was nearly succeeded to overthrow the government supported by the Marxists, but were eventually subdued in the 60s. Failing to demolish state power, they became disillusioned, inward-looking. Suddenly exhibiting a postmodern skepticism of grand myths such as Marxism and Communism, they began to commit themselves to language itself. Disengaging themselves from politics, they became linguistic revolutionaries, finding revolution in terms of speech, and began to view literature, reading and writing as subversive political acts in themselves. Intellectuals began attending to how words mean more than what they mean. Increasingly distrustful of language claiming to convey only single authoritarian message-they began exploring how words can say many different meanings simultaneously.
But by the time all this had taken place in France, Jacques Derrida had emerged, in the late 1960s in America, as the most avant-garde of the avant-garde. At his lecture given at the Johns Hopkins University in 1966, "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", he had caused a stir in American academia. His thought struck a new chord that caused many previous philosophers to be reassessed, and it set the tone for much thought to come. It was something of a disharmonious chord,for his forte was a subversive mode of reading authoritarian texts, or any texts. This style of reading came to be known as deconstruction. Then in France deconstruction, kicking existentialism aside, was suddenly much in vogue. Derrida became the philosopher of the day, the new 'enfant terrible', the new philosopher punk, of French intellectalism.
If Derrida has managed to turn much of Western thought on its head, he has done so only by standing on the shoulders of Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger and Saussure.
Derrida shares with Nietzsche a skepticism about philosophy in general, but especially its style, and its truth claims. Both of them write in a style that emphasises the dance of thought on the playground of knowledge- a dance that is playful, waltzing between extremes such as absolute certainty and absolute doubt.
The word "deconstruction" comes from the German philosopher Martin Heideggar's(1889-1976) concept of 'Destruktion', his call for the loosening up of the old tradition of ontology-the study of ultimate Rock Bottom Reality-through an exposure of its internal development.
What is Deconstruction?
Defining deconstruction is an activity that goes against the whole thrust of Derrida's thought. Yet we can say-
Deconstruction often involves a way of reading that concerns itself with decentering-with unmasking the problematic nature of all centers.
According to Derrida, all western thought is based on the idea of a center-an Origin, a Truth, an Ideal Form, a Fixed Point, an Immovable Mover, an Essence, a God, a Presence, which is usually capitalized, and guarantees all meaning.
For instance for 2000 years much of Western culture has been centered on the idea of Christianity and Christ.
The problem with centers, for Derrida, is that they attempt to exclude. In doing so they ignore, repress or marginalize others(which become the Other).
In male-dominated societies, man is central( and woman is the marginalized Other, repressed, ignored, pushed to the margins).
If you have a culture which has Christ in the center of its icons, then Christians will be central to that culture, and Buddhists, Muslims, Jews-anybody different-will be in the margins-marginalized-pushed to the outside. (We must remember that Derrida was born into an assimilated Jewish family in Algiers, growing up as a member of a marginalized, dispossessed culture.)
so the longing for a center spawns 'binary opposites', with one term of the opposition central and the other marginal. Furthermore, centers want to fix, or freeze the play of binary opposites.
According to Derrida we have no access to reality except through concepts, codes and categories, and the human mind functions by forming conceptual pairs.
According to Derrida we have no access to reality except through concepts, codes and categories, and the human mind functions by forming conceptual pairs. Icons with Christ or Buddha or whatever in the center try to tell us that what is in the center is the only reality. All other views are repressed. Drawing such an icon is an attempt to freeze the play of opposites between, for example, Christian/Jew or Christian/pagan. The Jew and the pagan are not even represented in such art. But icons are just one of the social practices that try to freeze the play of opposites-there are many more-such as advertising, social codes, taboos, conventions, categories, rituals, etc. But reality and language are not as simple and singular as icons with a central, exclusive image in their middle-they are more like ambiguous figures.
Derrida says that all of Western thought behaves in the same way, forming pairs of binary opposites in which one member of the pair is privileged, freezing the play of the system, and marginalising the other member of the pair.
Deconstruction is a tactic of decentering, a way of reading, which first makes us aware of the centrality of the central term. Then it attempts to subvert the central term so that the marginalized term can become central. The marginalized term temporarily overthrows the hierarchy.
Differance::
Derrida employs a whole series of such playful inventions:
pharmakon - poison/antidote (in his reading of Plato )
hymen - virginity/ consummation; inner/outer ( in his reading of Mallarme)
supplement - surplus/ necessary addition ( in his reading of Rousseau)
Difference(with an e) is crucial for Derrida because it was an important concept for those thinkers who influenced Derrida- Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl and Heidegger. It was especially important, however, for Ferdinand de Saussure for whom language as a system of differences is an important concept in structural linguistics. In his 'Course in General Linguistics' Saussure asserts that language is based on 'relation'-that words produce meanings because they are elements in a system of differences. In this system there are no positive elements-no element that can be called simply 'itself'.
Differance includes the meaning of differing, of being different from something else.
Yet differance includes not only the meaning 'to differ'-to be different from something else-but to defer, to delay, to put off till later.
Any attempt to define differance, which is not a contradiction. For like Derrida's other hinge mechanisms (pharmakon, supplement, hymen,etc.) it is ambiguous. Its play hinges on at least two meanings.
Yet, no meaning of differance ever arrives, because it is always already suspended between two meanings: "to differ" and "to defer"-without ever settling into one or the other.
And if the meaning of differance is (n)either "to defer" (n) or "to differ"-then there is no stable meaning that can ground it in the present-that can stabilize its shape-shifting. It will always dance around like a trickster. It can never be reduced to any one meaning at any one time. If there were some stable presence or meaning that could fix the meaning-the entire "philosophy" which hinges on 'differance' would be in error, and would not need pivotal, hinge mechanisms such as 'pharmakon,hymen, supplement' and 'differance'.
But if 'differance' is such a key "non-word" or "non-concept"-and if it is so important in literary studies-then it must-by this time- have degenerated into a kind of buzz word that could be applied to just about situation.
It is important to note that these terms arise out of the specific books Derrida is reading, wherein they perform very specific tasks, and are not meant to be imported into and applied to other texts, though you wouldn't probably get thrown in jail for using 'pharmakon', for instance, in a literary analysis.
*But why does Derrida spell 'differance' with an "a"-'ance'?
'Differance' in French is spelled the same as in English-with an -'ence'. Derrida intentionally misspells it as 'differance' (with an 'ance') as if it made no 'difference'-because after all-he is delivering a speech-and a speech is supposed to be more effective than writing in communicating the speaker's meaning. But is it? After all, when spoken, you cannot tell the difference between the "e" and the "a"-difference and differance sound the same in French.
*One can tell the differance between difference and differance only in writing!
When spoken the differance is lost. Thus (the) differance can be seen, but not heard. You could say that this is writing's revenge upon speech for having been marginalised.
So whether Derrida says 'difference' or 'differance' in his speech, the audience does not know the 'difference'. A simple "meaning'' of differance can never arrive-it is always suspended-playing between differing and deferring-and this suspension creates a kind of 'interval' or 'blank' in space and time that underlies all cases of differing.
The Dream Work, The Origin of Dreams, The Dream Machine and the Mechanisms of Dream Work by Freud
The idea that the dream content consists initially of the various sensory impressions received by the sleeper during sleep, together with the worries of the previous day, and exciting experiences mainly of the recent past. Freud argues that to this content repressed trends or wishes from the unconscious tend to attach themselves, but in order to evade the censorship, and fulfill the function which is to fulfill the wish to sleep
The dream work is a special case of the effects produced by two different mental groupings on each other-that is, of the consequences of mental splitting; and it seems identical in all essentials with the process of distortion which transforms the repressed complexes into symptoms where there is unsuccessful repression."(Richard Osborne, Freud for Beginners)
The Origin of Dreams
¤Recent events and obvious emotional facts-like being made angry. Revenge is obtained in the dream-simple wish fulfillment.
¤Many ideas blended together by the dream, otherwise known as condensation.
¤Displacement: an important event may be represented by a recent but unimportant memory. Free association uncovers the links.
¤Long-buried memories represented by recent trivial ideas-deep displacement which only psychoanalysis can uncover.
A dream is a fulfilled wish. "The dream is the disguised fulfillment of a forbidden or repressed wish after all."
The Dream Machine
Freud discovers that the hidden wish in dreams is often of a sexual nature in adults. The function of dreams is to discharge the tensions of repressed and forbidden wishes.
The Mechanisms of the Dream Work:
The mechanisms of the dream work are-
(1) Condensation:
Term used to describe partial fusion of two or more ideas, occurring particularly in dreams, and producing a characteristic type of distortion, illustrated by such works as "treaty of Breast-Litovsk"
One image can stand for many associations.. The complexity of the latent content of a dream can therefore be derived from analyzing how repressed ideas,old ideas, unrecognized ideas and unthought-out associations connect up with the condensed image that is at the forefront of the dream. The way that a single idea or event can simultaneously represent different impulses Freud calls "over-determination".
(2) Displacement:
General sense, transfer of an object from one place to another:the shifting of affect from one item to another to which it does not really belong, particularly in a dream.
Feelings related to one thing are connected to a different one; for example, the murderous feeling about the sister-in-law are displaced onto the little white dog in the example of a lady who strangled a dog in dream!
(3) Dramatization:
Dreams are of course, almost wholly visual, rather like a film. Like some bad films there often seems to be little connection between the events and images in a dream. However, as they say, every picture tells a story. In dreams, the story is hidden, and the visuals are the clue.
(4) Symbolization:
Images stand in for, or symbolize, other things. Phallic symbols, such as guns, tall round building etc. are now widely recognized(interestingly). Dreams make great use of symbols. Freud said, "in dreams, symbols are used almost exclusively for the expression of sexual objects and relations".
(5) Secondary Elaboration:
When someone wakes up they recall their dream and start to think about what it means. This starts with an interpretation, which can take you further away from the latent content.
In summary, we can say that dreams are distorted, disguised versions of hidden and repressed wishes. They are what the conscious mind gets as a report of what is going on in the unconscious, only through a scrambler.
If Freud is right about dreams, and surely is, then the interpretation of dreams is conclusive evidence of the existence of the unconscious. What else this proves is more difficult to analyze. The way in which Freud understood the role of symbols in dreams, their ability to carry other meanings, profoundly affects our understanding of modern culture.
The dream work is a special case of the effects produced by two different mental groupings on each other-that is, of the consequences of mental splitting; and it seems identical in all essentials with the process of distortion which transforms the repressed complexes into symptoms where there is unsuccessful repression."(Richard Osborne, Freud for Beginners)
The Origin of Dreams
¤Recent events and obvious emotional facts-like being made angry. Revenge is obtained in the dream-simple wish fulfillment.
¤Many ideas blended together by the dream, otherwise known as condensation.
¤Displacement: an important event may be represented by a recent but unimportant memory. Free association uncovers the links.
¤Long-buried memories represented by recent trivial ideas-deep displacement which only psychoanalysis can uncover.
A dream is a fulfilled wish. "The dream is the disguised fulfillment of a forbidden or repressed wish after all."
The Dream Machine
Freud discovers that the hidden wish in dreams is often of a sexual nature in adults. The function of dreams is to discharge the tensions of repressed and forbidden wishes.
The Mechanisms of the Dream Work:
The mechanisms of the dream work are-
(1) Condensation:
Term used to describe partial fusion of two or more ideas, occurring particularly in dreams, and producing a characteristic type of distortion, illustrated by such works as "treaty of Breast-Litovsk"
One image can stand for many associations.. The complexity of the latent content of a dream can therefore be derived from analyzing how repressed ideas,old ideas, unrecognized ideas and unthought-out associations connect up with the condensed image that is at the forefront of the dream. The way that a single idea or event can simultaneously represent different impulses Freud calls "over-determination".
(2) Displacement:
General sense, transfer of an object from one place to another:the shifting of affect from one item to another to which it does not really belong, particularly in a dream.
Feelings related to one thing are connected to a different one; for example, the murderous feeling about the sister-in-law are displaced onto the little white dog in the example of a lady who strangled a dog in dream!
(3) Dramatization:
Dreams are of course, almost wholly visual, rather like a film. Like some bad films there often seems to be little connection between the events and images in a dream. However, as they say, every picture tells a story. In dreams, the story is hidden, and the visuals are the clue.
(4) Symbolization:
Images stand in for, or symbolize, other things. Phallic symbols, such as guns, tall round building etc. are now widely recognized(interestingly). Dreams make great use of symbols. Freud said, "in dreams, symbols are used almost exclusively for the expression of sexual objects and relations".
(5) Secondary Elaboration:
When someone wakes up they recall their dream and start to think about what it means. This starts with an interpretation, which can take you further away from the latent content.
In summary, we can say that dreams are distorted, disguised versions of hidden and repressed wishes. They are what the conscious mind gets as a report of what is going on in the unconscious, only through a scrambler.
If Freud is right about dreams, and surely is, then the interpretation of dreams is conclusive evidence of the existence of the unconscious. What else this proves is more difficult to analyze. The way in which Freud understood the role of symbols in dreams, their ability to carry other meanings, profoundly affects our understanding of modern culture.
Deception
Acting down and acting up
smiling faces and sparkling eyes
fruitless trying to hide
the barrenness inside.
smiling faces and sparkling eyes
fruitless trying to hide
the barrenness inside.
শুক্রবার, ১৯ অক্টোবর, ২০১২
I want to love you like this
I want to love you without any comma semicolon and even without a fullstop
বৃহস্পতিবার, ১৮ অক্টোবর, ২০১২
Traits of my personality: Revealing 1
I'm the thief in my family sphere or wherever I live yet I don't have fame on this! I think myself to have access and right to all the things family have both secret and known, valuable and valueless. I use all the things of the family without feeling necessity of getting or receiving permission. I think I possess right to all of the things as my own.
See, here I'm giving justification for my action!
See, here I'm giving justification for my action!
বুধবার, ১৭ অক্টোবর, ২০১২
Base and Superstructure: What Marx Meant
"The simplest Marxist model of society sees it as constituted by a base( the material means of production, distribution and exchange) and a superstructure, which is the "cultural" world of ideas, art, religion, law and so on.
The essential Marxist view is that the latter things are not 'innocent; but are 'determined'(or shaped) by the nature of the economic base. (Beginning Theory, Peter Barry)
Karl Marx's " A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" in which he states that-"...The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.
In "German Ideology" we'll see Marx to say- "The production of ideas, concepts and consciousness is first of all directly interwoven with the material intercourse of man, the language of real life. Concerning, thinking, the spiritual intercourse of men, appear here as the direct efflux of men's material behaviour. ... Consciousness does not determine life: life determines consciousness.
In his "A contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" he says- "With the change of economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed."
There is at least one earlier use, by Marx, of the term 'superstructure'. It is in the "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon(1851-52)- "Upon the several forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, a whole superstructure is reared of various and peculiarly shaped feelings, illusions, habits of thought and conceptions of life."
Terry Eagleton precisely says- "The social relations between men, in other words, are bound up with the way they produce their material life."
He(Mr. Eagleton) in his "Marxism and Literary Criticism" says-
After feudalism,-"the development of new modes of productive organization is based on a changed set of social relations-this time between the capitalist class who owns those means of production, and the proletarian class whose labour-power the capitalist buys for profit. Taken together, these 'forces' and 'relations' of production form what Marx calls 'the economic structure of society; what is more commonly known by Marxism as the economic 'base' or 'infrastructure' From this economic 'base', in every period emerges a 'superstructure'-certain forms of law and politics, a certain kind of state, whose essential function is to legitimate the power of the social class which owns the means of economic production. But the superstructure contains more than this; it also consists of certain 'definite forms of social consciousness' (Political, religious, ethical, aesthetic and so on), which is what Marxism designates as ideology. The function of ideology, also, is to legitimate the power of the ruling class in society; the dominant ideas of a society are the ideas of its ruling class.
Art, then, is for Marxism part of the 'superstructure' of society. ... To understand literature, then, means understanding the total social process of which it is part.
Georgy Plekhanov- "The social mentality of an age is conditioned by that age's social relations."
Literary works are not mysteriously inspired or explicable simply in terms of their author's psychology. They are forms of perception, particular ways of seeing the world... Which is the 'social mentality' or ideology of an age.
Raymond Williams finds three senses of superstructure emerging:
(a) legal and political forms which express existing real relations of production
(b) forms of consciousness which express a particular class view of the world
(c) a process in which, over a whole range of activities, men become conscious of a fundamental economic conflict and fight it out.
These three senses would direct our attention respectively, to (a) institutions, (b) forms of consciousness (c) political and cultural practices..
The essential Marxist view is that the latter things are not 'innocent; but are 'determined'(or shaped) by the nature of the economic base. (Beginning Theory, Peter Barry)
Karl Marx's " A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" in which he states that-"...The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.
In "German Ideology" we'll see Marx to say- "The production of ideas, concepts and consciousness is first of all directly interwoven with the material intercourse of man, the language of real life. Concerning, thinking, the spiritual intercourse of men, appear here as the direct efflux of men's material behaviour. ... Consciousness does not determine life: life determines consciousness.
In his "A contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" he says- "With the change of economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed."
There is at least one earlier use, by Marx, of the term 'superstructure'. It is in the "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon(1851-52)- "Upon the several forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, a whole superstructure is reared of various and peculiarly shaped feelings, illusions, habits of thought and conceptions of life."
Terry Eagleton precisely says- "The social relations between men, in other words, are bound up with the way they produce their material life."
He(Mr. Eagleton) in his "Marxism and Literary Criticism" says-
After feudalism,-"the development of new modes of productive organization is based on a changed set of social relations-this time between the capitalist class who owns those means of production, and the proletarian class whose labour-power the capitalist buys for profit. Taken together, these 'forces' and 'relations' of production form what Marx calls 'the economic structure of society; what is more commonly known by Marxism as the economic 'base' or 'infrastructure' From this economic 'base', in every period emerges a 'superstructure'-certain forms of law and politics, a certain kind of state, whose essential function is to legitimate the power of the social class which owns the means of economic production. But the superstructure contains more than this; it also consists of certain 'definite forms of social consciousness' (Political, religious, ethical, aesthetic and so on), which is what Marxism designates as ideology. The function of ideology, also, is to legitimate the power of the ruling class in society; the dominant ideas of a society are the ideas of its ruling class.
Art, then, is for Marxism part of the 'superstructure' of society. ... To understand literature, then, means understanding the total social process of which it is part.
Georgy Plekhanov- "The social mentality of an age is conditioned by that age's social relations."
Literary works are not mysteriously inspired or explicable simply in terms of their author's psychology. They are forms of perception, particular ways of seeing the world... Which is the 'social mentality' or ideology of an age.
Raymond Williams finds three senses of superstructure emerging:
(a) legal and political forms which express existing real relations of production
(b) forms of consciousness which express a particular class view of the world
(c) a process in which, over a whole range of activities, men become conscious of a fundamental economic conflict and fight it out.
These three senses would direct our attention respectively, to (a) institutions, (b) forms of consciousness (c) political and cultural practices..
মঙ্গলবার, ১৬ অক্টোবর, ২০১২
Elizabethan Age
Elizabethan age is the supreme age for England with comparison to other ages the history of England is divided into.
England for the first time in European history appeared as the leader in politics, literature and trade and commerce.
For politics, Queen Elizabeth was one of the shrewd politicians of all times and very successful administrator. It was the time of religious bigotry and confusion and difference among different Christian sects. She ablehandedly and with cunning and intelligence managed them all and even sometimes being too harsh.
Defeating the Spanish Armada in 1588 can be considered as one of her supreme achievements! It was such an important event in history that from then on England appeared as a powerful navy which ensured them as the leading country with colonies which comprised of the half of the world in the later centuries and their supremacy in navy was remain unchallenged until the second world war when USA took its place.
In literature this age was the most flourishing one. We can get rare example of such profuse production of various arts in a single age. It was the time of Christopher Marlowe,one of the finest playwright of world literature.
It was the time of Ben Johnson, a learned and well taught genius.
It was the time of Sir Philip Sidney,the perfect Elizabethan character in manifold diversity.
Above all, it was the time of the bard, William Shakespeare who sang such eternal songs the world is still mesmerized in getting the pleasure immortal and finding the meaning of those!
It was the time of Francis Bacon who pioneered the English prose who said things in precision and exactness and in extreme brief with epigrams and wits.
It was the age when England felt confident on her and the nation began to rise to rule the world for years ahead.
England for the first time in European history appeared as the leader in politics, literature and trade and commerce.
For politics, Queen Elizabeth was one of the shrewd politicians of all times and very successful administrator. It was the time of religious bigotry and confusion and difference among different Christian sects. She ablehandedly and with cunning and intelligence managed them all and even sometimes being too harsh.
Defeating the Spanish Armada in 1588 can be considered as one of her supreme achievements! It was such an important event in history that from then on England appeared as a powerful navy which ensured them as the leading country with colonies which comprised of the half of the world in the later centuries and their supremacy in navy was remain unchallenged until the second world war when USA took its place.
In literature this age was the most flourishing one. We can get rare example of such profuse production of various arts in a single age. It was the time of Christopher Marlowe,one of the finest playwright of world literature.
It was the time of Ben Johnson, a learned and well taught genius.
It was the time of Sir Philip Sidney,the perfect Elizabethan character in manifold diversity.
Above all, it was the time of the bard, William Shakespeare who sang such eternal songs the world is still mesmerized in getting the pleasure immortal and finding the meaning of those!
It was the time of Francis Bacon who pioneered the English prose who said things in precision and exactness and in extreme brief with epigrams and wits.
It was the age when England felt confident on her and the nation began to rise to rule the world for years ahead.
রবিবার, ৩০ সেপ্টেম্বর, ২০১২
Conflict with my selves
I am for a long time becoming an irritating character to me. I lose control on me in many occasions I want to have a stronger grip.
I can't control myself. My self turns autocratic in many occasions. It need to be democratized. The responsibilities should be divided on the other selves as well.
I can't control myself. My self turns autocratic in many occasions. It need to be democratized. The responsibilities should be divided on the other selves as well.
Of Heroes and Villains
Heroes and villains are of same interest to me. I want to know why someone succeed,why some other failed;why someone is termed as hero and the some other as villain.
I've seen history to be the battleground of the heroes and the villains.
I've equal respect and interest to both of the group.Because they show us the way with their success and failure.
I've seen history to be the battleground of the heroes and the villains.
I've equal respect and interest to both of the group.Because they show us the way with their success and failure.
শনিবার, ২৯ সেপ্টেম্বর, ২০১২
Moon, The Tomboy
The moon is hanging herself like a tomboy on the roof of the highrise building-
The model girls in the billboards are competing with each other in putting their clothes off
And trying to be as naked as the moon is.
Lets gallop the moon to the full mouth like a sweet "Rosgulla"!
As hungry as Sukanto,I'm.
The model girls in the billboards are competing with each other in putting their clothes off
And trying to be as naked as the moon is.
Lets gallop the moon to the full mouth like a sweet "Rosgulla"!
As hungry as Sukanto,I'm.
শুক্রবার, ২৮ সেপ্টেম্বর, ২০১২
Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand: A Study
Untouchable
It is written in a third person omniscient narrative.There is a stream of consciousness technique in it. There is a slight incestuous instance in a part of the Novel. Bakha's jealousy on the upcoming marriage of his sister Sohini,and his possessive mentality manifested vividly in the passage where Bakha was dishonoured in the temple and Sohini mistreated by the pundit and both of them were accused of "polluting" the holy place.We must remember that it was the time of Joyce,Woolf,Elliot in the 20s.
We made a terrible journey in the world of latrins,ditches,swipers, agonies,mistreatment,abuses,and dishonor along with Bakha. After reaching page number 100 we find Bakha truly happy/pleased for the first time.
He was given a hockey stick by Havildar Charat Singh."He was overcome by the man's kindness . He was grateful,grateful,haltingly grateful,falteringly grateful,stumblingly grateful,so grateful that he didn't know how he could walk the ten yards to the corner to be out of the sight of his benevolent and generous host(p100)"
How ugly the morning was,how cruel the people were in the morning,how tough time he had all the day,yet we find him to say "How beautiful the afternoon is"(p101)
See ,how a simple hockey stick made him happy,how limited his dreams were!
With the much desired new hockey stick Bakha is on the field to play in the team 38th Dogra boys against 31st Punjabis . There arose a fight among the boys in a broil over a foul by Chota, Ram Charan, Ali, Abdullah on the goalkeeper of the 31st Punjabis who at first struck Bakha spitefully being defeated by superior tactics of the later. There was huge fighting,punching and throwing of the stones among them.(p106) "But a bad throw from Ram Charan's hand caught him(the little boy of the Sahib,who was keeping a watch over Bakha's coat) a rap on the skull. He gave a sharp,piercing shriek and fell unconscious."
This accident bring about new disgrace for Bakha. As the mother of that boy without knowing the whole thing, abused and scolded Bakha. (107)" I knew my touch would pollute. But it was impossible not to pick him up. He was dazed,the poor little thing. And she abused me. I only get abuse and derision wherever I go. Pollution,pollution,I do nothing else but pollute people"
He returned home after his ullyssesan or Herculean hard day. At home he faced the "rain of abuse" from his father.
After calculating his all days work what he found in his account?
We will find him to say-(110)" Unlucky, unlucky day! What have I done to deserve all this?' he cried in exasperation."
(111)"What a day I have had! Unlucky, inauspicious day! I wish I could die!' And he sat nursing his head in his hands, utterly given up to despair."
Bakha got a friendly touch for the first time in his utter despair from Colonel Hutchinson, a missionary,and a chief of the local Salvation Army.
He inherited his apprehension from his father of the suspicious activities of the missionaries.(p114)"If he(Lakha) saw him(Colonel) in the distance,saying that the old sahib had wanted to convert them to the religion of Yessuh Messih and to make them sahibs like himself,but that he had refused to leave the Hindu fold, saying that the religion which was good enough for his forefathers was good enough for him."
Though we can say it is unethical or problematic to force other to convert in Christianity, but the logic Lakha showed behind not accepting Christianity were nothing sacred but devotion to his ancestors!
Yet Colonel Hutchinson used his all energy and tricks to convert Bakha into Christianity. Bakha got relieved from the grip of the padre after the padre himself caught in the grip of his everdominating wife who was spiteful of the 'dirty' 'bhangis' and 'chamars'!
Then the Arrival of Mahatma Gandhi episode:
Mahatma Gandhi's arrival is similarly described as the pass over of the Jesus. The coming of Mahatma Gandhi is described as the "The Coming of the Ship" episode in "The Prophet" by Kahlil Gibran, where the arrival of 'Al-mustafa is described. The untouchables were running towards Gandhi,(127)and like Bakha they hadn't stopped to ask themselves why they were going.
They were just going; the act of going, of walking, running, hurrying,occupied them. Their present motive was to get there,to get there somehow,as quickly as possible."
Mahatma Gandhi, messaiya came to speak their apparent deliverance. Mahatma's coming and the running of the people towards him was quite similar with the pass over of Jesus. (134) "This strange man seemed to have the genius that could, by a single dramatic act, rally multicoloured, multi-tongued India to himself."
then the chanting of the hymn episode.
Its a beautiful hymn with profound meaning:
'The dawn is here, O traveller, arise:
Past is the night, and yet sleep seals thine eyes.
Lost is the soul that sleeps-dost not thou know?
The sleepless one finds peace beyond all woe.
...
What thou wouldst do to-morrow do to-day,
Do thou the task that thou must face to-day.
What shall avail thy sorrow and dismay
When thieving birds have borne thy grain away.
-A Hindu hymn
Then came the Mahatma's most waited speech. Mahatma's speech was listened from Bakha's perspective, where he was hanging himself on a tree to listen Gandhi's speech. The balmy, comforting sympathy of Gandhi touched and swayed the heart of Bakha.
The honour he was feeling with the words of Gandhi,at the same time he was remembering the disgrace he had gone through that day.
The Speech to Bakha was as weighty and liberating as the speech of prophet Mohammad(pbuh) in the "Last Pilgrimage"(Biday Haj) where he declared "the slaves will get equal treatment as their master, they will eat the same foods,wear the same clothes as their master do".Gandhi declared-(139)" All public wells, temples, roads, schools, sanatoriums, must be declared open to the Untouchables. And, if you all profess to love me, give me a direct proof of your love by carrying on propaganda against the observance of untouchability."
After the end of Gandhi's speech Bakha met two educated young man,one of them who was 'Vilayat' returned who scolded and criticised Gandhi's speech severely. And the other was a "(141) a young man with a delicate feline face, illuminated by sparkling dark eyes and long black curly hair, who stood next to him dressed in flowing Indian robes like a poet's.
That young poet argued against that 'Vilayat' returned young man for Gandhi.
The young poet is shown to be a nationalist. We get their introduction in the page-144, Iqbal Nath Sarshar,the young poet who edits the Nawan Jug(New Era).and his companion was Mr. R.N. Bashir, B.A.(Oxon.),Barrister-at-Law.
(146)Their important part of the discussion was of "the flush system",to introduce the machine which clears dung without anyone having to handle it.
Bakha was in great wonder how the machine would be!
As the sun descended with the odyssian eventful journey of Bakha,he had started his homeward walk.
"(147) As the brief Indian twilight came and went, a sudden impulse shot through the transformations of space and time, and gathered all the elements that were dispersed in the stream of his soul into a tentative decision:'I shall go and tell father all that Gandhi said about us,' he whispered to himself, 'and all that that poet said . Perhaps I can find the poet some day and ask him about his machine.' And he proceeded homewards.
What happened to Bakha?
Did he changed his profession and his fate?
Or, he remained in the same profession which is written in his blood?
I don't know-
It is written in a third person omniscient narrative.There is a stream of consciousness technique in it. There is a slight incestuous instance in a part of the Novel. Bakha's jealousy on the upcoming marriage of his sister Sohini,and his possessive mentality manifested vividly in the passage where Bakha was dishonoured in the temple and Sohini mistreated by the pundit and both of them were accused of "polluting" the holy place.We must remember that it was the time of Joyce,Woolf,Elliot in the 20s.
We made a terrible journey in the world of latrins,ditches,swipers, agonies,mistreatment,abuses,and dishonor along with Bakha. After reaching page number 100 we find Bakha truly happy/pleased for the first time.
He was given a hockey stick by Havildar Charat Singh."He was overcome by the man's kindness . He was grateful,grateful,haltingly grateful,falteringly grateful,stumblingly grateful,so grateful that he didn't know how he could walk the ten yards to the corner to be out of the sight of his benevolent and generous host(p100)"
How ugly the morning was,how cruel the people were in the morning,how tough time he had all the day,yet we find him to say "How beautiful the afternoon is"(p101)
See ,how a simple hockey stick made him happy,how limited his dreams were!
With the much desired new hockey stick Bakha is on the field to play in the team 38th Dogra boys against 31st Punjabis . There arose a fight among the boys in a broil over a foul by Chota, Ram Charan, Ali, Abdullah on the goalkeeper of the 31st Punjabis who at first struck Bakha spitefully being defeated by superior tactics of the later. There was huge fighting,punching and throwing of the stones among them.(p106) "But a bad throw from Ram Charan's hand caught him(the little boy of the Sahib,who was keeping a watch over Bakha's coat) a rap on the skull. He gave a sharp,piercing shriek and fell unconscious."
This accident bring about new disgrace for Bakha. As the mother of that boy without knowing the whole thing, abused and scolded Bakha. (107)" I knew my touch would pollute. But it was impossible not to pick him up. He was dazed,the poor little thing. And she abused me. I only get abuse and derision wherever I go. Pollution,pollution,I do nothing else but pollute people"
He returned home after his ullyssesan or Herculean hard day. At home he faced the "rain of abuse" from his father.
After calculating his all days work what he found in his account?
We will find him to say-(110)" Unlucky, unlucky day! What have I done to deserve all this?' he cried in exasperation."
(111)"What a day I have had! Unlucky, inauspicious day! I wish I could die!' And he sat nursing his head in his hands, utterly given up to despair."
Bakha got a friendly touch for the first time in his utter despair from Colonel Hutchinson, a missionary,and a chief of the local Salvation Army.
He inherited his apprehension from his father of the suspicious activities of the missionaries.(p114)"If he(Lakha) saw him(Colonel) in the distance,saying that the old sahib had wanted to convert them to the religion of Yessuh Messih and to make them sahibs like himself,but that he had refused to leave the Hindu fold, saying that the religion which was good enough for his forefathers was good enough for him."
Though we can say it is unethical or problematic to force other to convert in Christianity, but the logic Lakha showed behind not accepting Christianity were nothing sacred but devotion to his ancestors!
Yet Colonel Hutchinson used his all energy and tricks to convert Bakha into Christianity. Bakha got relieved from the grip of the padre after the padre himself caught in the grip of his everdominating wife who was spiteful of the 'dirty' 'bhangis' and 'chamars'!
Then the Arrival of Mahatma Gandhi episode:
Mahatma Gandhi's arrival is similarly described as the pass over of the Jesus. The coming of Mahatma Gandhi is described as the "The Coming of the Ship" episode in "The Prophet" by Kahlil Gibran, where the arrival of 'Al-mustafa is described. The untouchables were running towards Gandhi,(127)and like Bakha they hadn't stopped to ask themselves why they were going.
They were just going; the act of going, of walking, running, hurrying,occupied them. Their present motive was to get there,to get there somehow,as quickly as possible."
Mahatma Gandhi, messaiya came to speak their apparent deliverance. Mahatma's coming and the running of the people towards him was quite similar with the pass over of Jesus. (134) "This strange man seemed to have the genius that could, by a single dramatic act, rally multicoloured, multi-tongued India to himself."
then the chanting of the hymn episode.
Its a beautiful hymn with profound meaning:
'The dawn is here, O traveller, arise:
Past is the night, and yet sleep seals thine eyes.
Lost is the soul that sleeps-dost not thou know?
The sleepless one finds peace beyond all woe.
...
What thou wouldst do to-morrow do to-day,
Do thou the task that thou must face to-day.
What shall avail thy sorrow and dismay
When thieving birds have borne thy grain away.
-A Hindu hymn
Then came the Mahatma's most waited speech. Mahatma's speech was listened from Bakha's perspective, where he was hanging himself on a tree to listen Gandhi's speech. The balmy, comforting sympathy of Gandhi touched and swayed the heart of Bakha.
The honour he was feeling with the words of Gandhi,at the same time he was remembering the disgrace he had gone through that day.
The Speech to Bakha was as weighty and liberating as the speech of prophet Mohammad(pbuh) in the "Last Pilgrimage"(Biday Haj) where he declared "the slaves will get equal treatment as their master, they will eat the same foods,wear the same clothes as their master do".Gandhi declared-(139)" All public wells, temples, roads, schools, sanatoriums, must be declared open to the Untouchables. And, if you all profess to love me, give me a direct proof of your love by carrying on propaganda against the observance of untouchability."
After the end of Gandhi's speech Bakha met two educated young man,one of them who was 'Vilayat' returned who scolded and criticised Gandhi's speech severely. And the other was a "(141) a young man with a delicate feline face, illuminated by sparkling dark eyes and long black curly hair, who stood next to him dressed in flowing Indian robes like a poet's.
That young poet argued against that 'Vilayat' returned young man for Gandhi.
The young poet is shown to be a nationalist. We get their introduction in the page-144, Iqbal Nath Sarshar,the young poet who edits the Nawan Jug(New Era).and his companion was Mr. R.N. Bashir, B.A.(Oxon.),Barrister-at-Law.
(146)Their important part of the discussion was of "the flush system",to introduce the machine which clears dung without anyone having to handle it.
Bakha was in great wonder how the machine would be!
As the sun descended with the odyssian eventful journey of Bakha,he had started his homeward walk.
"(147) As the brief Indian twilight came and went, a sudden impulse shot through the transformations of space and time, and gathered all the elements that were dispersed in the stream of his soul into a tentative decision:'I shall go and tell father all that Gandhi said about us,' he whispered to himself, 'and all that that poet said . Perhaps I can find the poet some day and ask him about his machine.' And he proceeded homewards.
What happened to Bakha?
Did he changed his profession and his fate?
Or, he remained in the same profession which is written in his blood?
I don't know-
বুধবার, ১৯ সেপ্টেম্বর, ২০১২
রবিবার, ১৬ সেপ্টেম্বর, ২০১২
শনিবার, ৭ জুলাই, ২০১২
Bonolota Sen
Bonolota Sen was walking under dark woods in a dark night hurriedly.A man was following her like a shadow who's face as dark as the night was.She sensed that it was the grave of Jibananada Das,and to remember him and his famous poem "Bonolota Sen"some fake pearl like flowers were kept upon the chest of the grave.The dark night inspired her to collect those with her beautiful fingers gently.She immediately started leaving that place and set her feet move quickly.The shadow man continued following her.The smell of her hair made him mad and the surroundings.She,her fragrant hairs,murmuring of the trees,the flow of the airs,the following shadow,all were in profound enchantment.She was in a hurry and scared of her guilt of theft.The shadow man couldn't stand before her as he wasn't confident enough to pose threat against that lone traveler at night.
He,with his white Punjabi and curly submissive hair parted at the middle glaring at her keeping a distance.She was scared and cried to the shadow-
"I swear touching my hair
Let me go,don't touch dear."
The shadow disappeared listening the 'mantra'.She had gone away with the pearl of immortality in hand leaving the poet in a dark grave of ignominy.
He,with his white Punjabi and curly submissive hair parted at the middle glaring at her keeping a distance.She was scared and cried to the shadow-
"I swear touching my hair
Let me go,don't touch dear."
The shadow disappeared listening the 'mantra'.She had gone away with the pearl of immortality in hand leaving the poet in a dark grave of ignominy.
(She was the poem and the shadow was the poet.The poet tried to rape the poetry but failed as his confidence was low.)
সোমবার, ২ জুলাই, ২০১২
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