Chetan Bhagat: The Writer - Prof. Om Juneja

Prof. Om P. Juneja, Prof. Emeritus, HMP Institute of English Teaching and Research (Vallabh Vidya Nagar), Former, Prof. Dept. of English, M.S. Universtiy of Baroda - having talk with studetns of Department of English, M.K. Bhavnagar University, Bhavnagar. The topic of discusion is 'Chetan Bhagat - the Writer'. The speaker discussed:
* what is right / wrong with Chetan Bhagat
* Politics of Awards
* Young India and
* why study Chetan Bhagat?

The students of the Department of English are studying Chetan Bhagat's 'One Night @ The Call Centre'. They (especially Ajay Jajeda, Avani Dave, Deepti Joshi, Hirva Vora, Riddhi Jani and Nidhi Kunvarani) actiely participated in the talk via Google Hangout on Air.

You can view the auto-recorded video (which is interesting feature of Google Hangout on Air. Keep in mind, it is not simple video call over Hangout. It is Google Hangout on Air!)with a few edits on YouTube. The video is embedded hereunder:

Chetan Bhagat is quite a controversial write in the gallaries of canonical literary studies. Thus, he arouses quite contradictory reactions. There are people who are die-hard fan - and there are who do not miss a chance to attack him. View this wonderful video where the author meets the hater:




There were interesting debates on news channels regarding Chetan Bhagat's new book 'Half Girlfriend'.
Here are videos of those talk-shows:







(Nepathya - Aside)
Isn't the success story of Chetan Bhagat the success story of capitalism? The Capitalism functions on one mantra: 'Under the garb of Freedom, encash everything!" Turn everything into commodity, market it, create buyers and earn money. Be it faith or literature, market it like beverages and skin whiteners; and see the tamaashaa! Those who are not surprised to see the rising demand of Ganesh Pandals, are not surprised to see rising demands of Chetan Bhagat; as they very understand the market phenomenon in capitalist societies. However, the question is: "Are those who are surprised at Chetan Bhagat phenomenon, surprised or shocked at rising marketing and commodification of rituals/faith? (last two videos and this note updated on 29 Aug 2014)

There was an interesting discussion on 'What makes for a canonical writer?' on ELTAI Literature SIG. Let me share some of the observations which were discussed on this thread: (To give due respect to the originality of all the contributors, their views are copy-pasted retaining font size, type and colour as they designed them :) )

Some people say that Chetan Bhagat is not an "established writer". Some others say that he is not a literary author.

• So making a research or study on his works is useless and wont bring any good response or help increase API. 
  
  
  Now may I request you learned masters to please help me appease my curiosity and tell me how to differentiate between 'an established writer' and a 'non established writer' OR how to know whether a particular author is a literary author or not.
  
  
  For ex. Adiga wrote a single novel and he is accepted as an established writer and a literary author but Bhagat, despite writing almost half a dozen books is still lacking this status.
  
  
  Please help me. I'm much puzzled. ~ J.K. Mishra
  
  
• A difficult problem really. There are no set formulae to evaluate a writer to admit him in the literary fold. 
  A work should be faithful and true to the world it creates. It should present human problems and situations and not lead us into fanciful worlds of unreality. Apart from them there are formal features of a work which also help us to judge it.
  Try to read relevant chapters in Rene Wellek and Austin Warren's Theory of Literature. You may find them useful. ~ Nagarajan
• I do not know if I will be able to satisfy you with my query but let me try to answer. No work is really literary or non literary. It is we who place it in categories. I personally think that if a book is able to touch us deep inside and make us feel then the book is good as it emotes with us. As students and teachers of literature it is our duty to remove hierarchies and accept differences. Unfortunately, we are caught in this mire of canonisation. Today in many universities there are popular fiction courses and you may know about the anthology on pulp fiction. I do prefer Adiga to Bhagat because I felt that Adiga brought out the problem of the poor beautifully while I feel with Bhagat the purpose of the story is more to gain an audience. These are my own views. ~ kalpana Rao
• 
  

  It's all politics of literature teaching within the academia.  It's the reader and his/her assessment that matters. A few Mphil students of mine have done research on Bhagat.  One is doing PhD.  I have recommended him for PG course in a few autonomous colleges.  Mostly, those who denounce him have not read him!

  Common people have rejected Adiga though he is accepted by academics and award-giving institutions like Booker because of a new moral standard the White Tiger seems to suggest.

  The idea of canonical text can be traced back to ten qualities of a great work in Aristotle's Poetics.

  If we judge by Aristotle' standard, most Dalit lit cannot be labelled lit at all. ~ John Sekar
• I personally feel that no author, no art form, no form of any representation is either inferior or superior. Nothing is beyond the reach or relevance of academic interest.  These are days when we have serious research projects on cartoons, advertisements and even graffiti!  The crucial thing is probably the approach we take in analyzing or studying them, and the tools we use. ~ Lal C.A.
• 
  

  Chetan Bhagat is a master story teller and one the best-selling authors during the recent times.  All his books provide enjoyable reading.whether we consider them as literary works or not. It is  also a different question  altogether  if they would stand the test of time or not.  

  
  

  In my view one may take them up for research for the M.Phil.degree.At this level students are after all expected mainly  to get a thorough knowledge of methodology of doing literary research. But in the case of Ph.D. degree we expect  our scholars   attain a certain amount of scholarship at least in the field chosen. Can we expect it on the part of one who has just worked on Chetan Baghat?  ~ 
  

  S. Rajagopalan. 
• 
  

  Your point is worth arguing indeed. It all depends on how to classify the author in terms of literary canon. But if the canon is itself elitist how to identify the author for your project is a disturbing question. But one thing is sure, if the thesis statement accommodates the seriousness that is required, no one can reject it outright. In Malayalam literature also this kind of discussions happen especially (humorously) of course between two Varkeys. One is Muttath Varkey who is a popular writer of the late 50s and 60s and Ponkunnam Varkey who is a devoted Modernist with a strong moorings in native culture. The former was not generally taken seriously by the academia for "want of high seriousness" but the latter is adored by many researchers. Go ahead!   ~ 
  

  Dr.Muralikrishnan T.R.
• 
  

  I do not think that serious research on Chetan Bhagat is not possible and no univeristy can deny or invalidate degree, if a really serious work is done on any popular culture or literature. In fact, now it is time to give serious readings to contemporaneity in art, literature and culture.

  Popular fictions represent contemporary taste. If we deny its study, we will fail to understand it in future. They are cultural artefacts which requires serious attention. They have an appeal to the readers/viewers/audiences, which cannot be asked to abstain from. One should make genuine attempt to understand it. We should not forget that it was Aristotle's study of popular Greek dramatist and it was Dryden's study of popular English dramatist, that they are with us. We have glaring examples of writers like Wordsworth, who was considered as childish and his poem, nursery rhyms by elite critics - today the critics are dead, and Wordsworth is remembered as epoch-maker in hitory of Literature. Samule Beckett's 'absurdity' has an appeal to the people - and after bashing from elite critics, people started giving serious consideration - and Martin Esslin termed 'theatre of absurd'.

  
  

  So, the question of whether to study CB or Amish, or JKRowing or James Hadley Chase, Mills and Boons or for that matter any popular writer is irrelevant.

  
  

  But the important point is to give serious reading with scientific inquiry, objectiveness, systematic analysis, relevant hypothetical question, and with deep insight into the nature of research. The research tools/questions/methodology is important > in fact, it is 'the' important thing > rather than the object /text under evaluation. We can keep tools devised by Aristotle, Dryden, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Matthew Arnold, New Critics, Reader Response theorists, feminists, psychological critics, Northrop Frye, Marxists (this can be of great help in CB's case), post-structuralists (Derrida, Paul DeMan et all), post-colonial (Homi Bhabha, Spivak et all), new historicist (stephen Greenblatt) and New Cultural critics (from raymond williams, heidbige, hoggarth to Slovaj Zizek). . . . and if possible, device 'new canon' to read these new breeds of writers.

  
  

  The follwoing articles and books can be useful in the study: 

  Peter Swirski, "Popular and Highbrow Literature: A Comparative View" 
  

  Matthew Schneider-Mayerson "Popular Fiction Studies: The Advantages of a New Field" 

  Popular Fiction: Why We Read It, Why We Write It by Ann Maxwell/Elizabeth Lowell http://www.elizabethlowell.com/popfiction.html

  The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction EDITORS: David Glover, University of Southampton, Scott McCracken, Keele University. ~ 
  

  Dilip Barad
• 
  

  The ongoing debate on Chetan Bhagat needs some clarity. We can't question whether he is a literary figure or not. Keeping in view his books and their contents, we can easily observe the elements of literature .i.e. fictive background, ironical temper, imaginative impulse, comical vein, reformatory zeal, etc. that largely constitute the corpus of any literary piece. From all these angles, he stands as a literary figure.

  What we can question is- Is his language literary? that is also an important part of any powerful literature.From this angle, he doesn't have a literary pen at his command. A literary language is identified with a brilliant use of figure of speech, its narrative details, unconventional syntax intending to widen the horizon of literary expressions, unusual range of vocabulary, etc. Actually, it is the language of literature that induces irresistible reading of any literary writing. The force of language interwoven with thematic strings constitute a powerful literary creation. But Bhagat miserably fails in stuffing his works with this remarkable feature. We can juxtapose his writings with Arundhati / Kiran, etc. to understand this point more clearly. This linguistic weakness of Bhagat will always make the sensitive readers of literature doubt his literary potential to be reckoned in terms of universal and eternal values a literary piece truly inculcates.~ 
  

  Dr. Raj Kr Sharma
• 
  

  He is making so many young readers sensible towards zeitgeist. Beneath his seeming simplicity, hokey spiritualism n bollywoodish philosophy, there is 'something unnarratable - which compels people to read him. ~ Dilip Barad
• 
  

  
  

  To many, the call center has become the symbol of India's rapidly globalizing economy. While traditional India sleeps, a dynamic population of highly skilled,articulate professionals works through the night, functioning on U.S. time under made-up American aliases. They feign familiarity with a culture and climate

  
  

  they've never experienced, earn salaries that their elders couldn't have imagined (but still a fraction of what an American would make), and enjoy a lifestyle that's a cocktail of premature affluence and ersatz Westernization. It's a subculture that merits closer exam ination, and in Chetan Bhagat's One Night @ the Call Center, a breezy bestseller that has taken middle-class India by storm, the Samuel Johnsons of this brave new world have found their Boswell. ~ Shashi Tharoor.
• Serious critics will no doubt quibble with the two-dimensional characterization, the pedestrian prose, the plot's contrved deus ex machina, and the author's hokey spiritualism. But non of that matters. ~ Shashi Tharoor.
• Bhagat's tone is pitch-perfect, his observer's eye keenly focused on nuance and detail. Verisimilitude is all. ~ Shashi Tharoor.
• multiplying, and the demand for skilled "agents" has driven salaries up to ever more attractive levels. Although many may suffer the angst this novel so effectively conveys, most see a job in a call center as a passport to a better life, one offering more possibilities and choices than were imaginable to the previous generation. These young Indians may keep unsocial hours, neglect their family obligations, drink excessive cocktails with names like "Long Island Iced Tea," and date each other with

  a casualness that horrifies their par ents. But they are part of a social and economic revolution that is enriching and transforming India, mostly for the better. Chetan Bhagat may not entrely approve, but it's this new India that's buying his book.
• Do not miss to visit www.chetanbhagat.com > and his blog on this site to read responses from the readers and author's answers.
• One reason why I find Chetan Bhagat interesting is because he is so different from academically hyped `Indian Writing in English canon comprising mostly of the diasporic writers like Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri or Kiran Desai. The guy writes about people and world with which the ` Eng. Lit' academics are not really familiar. Bhagat's novels are about India that is more recognizable than the one you find in The Moor's Last Sigh or The Midnight's Children. The Eng Lit. scholars are more conversant with Jhumpa Lahiri's expatriate NRIs living in New York than with people who work in the call-centre just round the corner. ~ Prof. Sachin Ketkar, M.S. Uni., Baroda. Read more . . . http://sachinketkar.blogspot.in/2009/12/on-disliking-chetan-bhagat.html

All the students of Semester 4 (New Literature Course) are suggested to post thier views on how enriching it was to listen Prof. Juneja - on Google Plus Community of our Department or as comment under this blog.

Do not miss to review following writeups on Chetan Bhagat:

• http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jan/24/chetan-bhagat-robert-mccrum
• http://www.chetanbhagat.com/about/qa/
• http://forbesindia.com/interview/magazine-extra/the-writers-community-on-chetan-bhagat/8462/2
• http://www.chetanbhagat.com/about/media-coverage/
• http://forbesindia.com/interview/magazine-extra/an-interview-with-chetan-bhagat/8452/1?utm=slidebox
• http://centreright.in/2011/09/goodness-of-chetan-bhagat-and-why-the-elite-despise-him/
• http://vyasnamrata192011.blogspot.in/2013/04/thematic-concerns-in-novel-oncc_6.html
• http://centreright.in/2013/07/the-m-conundrum-in-defense-of-chetan-bhagat-2/#.U3WkRtKSySo
• 
  

Elaine Showalter: Towards A Feminist Poetics: The Summary

Elaine Showalter: Towards A Feminist Poetics

Dilip Barad

Department of English

Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Citation: Cite this

Abstract

This content explores the work and ideas of Elaine Showalter, a prominent figure in feminist literary theory and criticism. Showalter's writings emphasize the importance of understanding the feminist tradition and its impact on literary analysis. She criticizes stereotypes of feminism and the tendency to neglect theory, arguing for a poetics of feminist criticism. Showalter divides feminist criticism into two sections: the woman as reader or feminist critique, which examines the representation of women in literature and critiques male-dominated perspectives, and the woman as writer or gynocritics, which focuses on constructing a female framework for analyzing women's literature. Showalter acknowledges the challenges of defining women's writing but sees gynocriticism as a means to understand women's relation to literary culture. She outlines three phases of women's literature: the feminine phase, the feminist phase, and the female phase, each characterized by different goals and approaches. Showalter calls for a cultural perspective in feminist criticism that recognizes the diversity of women's experiences. Overall, Showalter's views on feminist poetics are intelligent, balanced, and thought-provoking, reflecting her belief in the transformative power of feminist analysis.

Keywords: Elaine Showalter, feminist literary theory, feminist critique, gynocritics, women's literature, cultural perspective.

About the author: Elaine Showalter (born January 21, 1941) is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues. She is one of the founders of feminist literary criticism in United States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocritics.

She is well known and respected in both academic and popular cultural fields. She has written and edited numerous books and articles focused on a variety of subjects, from feminist literary criticism to fashion, sometimes sparking widespread controversy, especially with her work on illnesses. Showalter has been a television critic for People magazine and a commentator on BBC radio and television.

Showalter is a specialist in Victorian literature and the Fin-de-Siecle (turn of the 19th century). Her most innovative work in this field is in madness and hysteria in literature, specifically in women’s writing and in the portrayal of female characters.

Showalter's best known works are Toward a Feminist Poetics (1979), The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture (1830–1980) (1985), Sexual Anarchy: Gender at Culture at the Fin de Siecle (1990), Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (1997), and Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (2001). In 2007 Showalter was chair of the judges for the prestigious British literary award, the Man Booker International Prize.

Showalter's book Inventing Herself (2001), a survey of feminist icons, seems to be the culmination of a long-time interest in communicating the importance of understanding feminist tradition. Showalter’s early essays and editorial work in the late 1970s and the 1980s survey the history of the feminist tradition within the “wilderness” of literary theory and criticism. Working in the field of feminist literary theory and criticism, which was just emerging as a serious scholarly pursuit in universities in the 1970s, Showalter's writing reflects a conscious effort to convey the importance of mapping her discipline’s past in order to both ground it in substantive theory, and amass a knowledge base that will be able to inform a path for future feminist academic pursuit.

Feminism: Feminist Criticism: Elaine Showalter from Dilip Barad

Showalter is concerned by stereotypes of feminism that see feminist critics as being ‘obsessed with the phallus’ and ‘obsessed with destroying male artists’. Showalter wonders if such stereotypes emerge from the fact that feminism lacks a fully articulated theory.

Another problem for Showalter is the way in which feminists turn away from theory as a result of the attitudes of some male academics: theory is their property. Showalter writes: ‘From this perspective, the academic demand for theory can only be heard as a threat to the feminist need for authenticity, and the visitor looking for a formula that he or she can take away without personal encounter is not welcome’. In response, Showalter wants to outline a poetics of feminist criticism.

In Toward a Feminist Poetics Showalter divides feminist criticism into two sections:

•The Woman as Reader or Feminist Critique : ‘the way in which a female reader changes our apprehension of a given text, awakening it to the significance of its sexual codes’; historically grounded inquiry which probes the ideological assumptions of literary phenomena’; ‘subjects include the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions of and misconceptions about women in criticism, and the fissures in male–constructed literary history’; ‘concerned with the exploitation and manipulation of the female audience, especially in popular culture and film, and with the analysis of woman–as–sign in semiotic systems’; ‘political and polemical’; like the Old Testament looking for the errors of the past.

One of the problems of the feminist critique is that it is male–orientated. If we study stereotypes of women, the sexism of male critics, and the limited roles women play in literary history, we are not learning what women have felt and experienced, but only what men thought women should be. […] The critique also has a tendency to naturalize women’s victimization by making it the inevitable and obsessive topic of discussion.

•The Woman as Writer or Gynocritics (la gynocritique) :

Showalter coined the term 'gynocritics' to describe literary criticism based in a feminine perspective. Probably the best description Showalter gives of gynocritics is in Towards a Feminist Poetics:

In contrast to [an] angry or loving fixation on male literature, the program of gynocritics is to construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather than to adapt male models and theories. Gynocritics begins at the point when we free ourselves from the linear absolutes of male literary history, stop trying to fit women between the lines of the male tradition, and focus instead on the newly visible world of female culture.

This does not mean that the goal of gynocritics is to erase the differences between male and female writing; gynocritics is not “on a pilgrimage to the promised land in which gender would lose its power, in which all texts would be sexless and equal, like angels”. Rather gynocritics aims to understand the specificity of women’s writing not as a product of sexism but as a fundamental aspect of female reality. Its prime concern is to see ‘woman as producer of textual meaning, with the history themes, genres, and structures of literature by women’. Its ‘subjects include the psychodynamics of female creativity. It studies linguistics and the problem of a female language in literary text. It reviews the trajectory of the individual or collective female literary career. It proposes ‘to construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, to develop new models based on women’s experience’. Its study  ‘focuses on the newly visible world of female culture’; ‘hypotheses of a female sub–culture’; ‘the occupations, interactions, and consciousness of women’. It projects how ‘feminine values penetrate and undermine the masculine systems that contain them’. And at its extreme, it is ‘engaged in the myth of the Amazons, and the fantasies of a separate female society’.

Showalter acknowledges the difficulty of “[d]efining the unique difference of women’s writing” which she says is “a slippery and demanding task” in “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness”. She says that gynocritics may never succeed in understanding the special differences of women’s writing, or realize a distinct female literary tradition. But, with grounding in theory and historical research, Showalter sees gynocriticism as a way to “learn something solid, enduring, and real about the relation of women to literary culture”.

Showalter then provides an exemplary feminist critique of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge to demonstrate that “one of the problems of the feminist critique is that  it is male-oriented,” meaning that, in some sense, every feminist critique, even when criticizing patriarchy, is focused toward the male. As an alternative, Showalter presents gynocritics as a way “to construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, to develop new models based on the study of female experience, rather that to adapt to male models and theories.”

To begin to trace out this radically female-centered theory, Showalter notes excerpts from feminist historians and sociologists. She then moves on to an engaging discussion of the experiences of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and other female authors to show the need for “completeness” in discussing women authors’ work way in which “it is necessary to leave oneself room to deal with other things besides [women writers'] work, so much has that work been influenced by conditions that have nothing whatever to do with art.”

Beauvoir, Cixous and Showalter: The Trio of Feminist Literary Thought

Three Phases:

From these experiences, Showalter then begins a rough sketch of some of the elements that have characterized women’s writing: awakening, suffering, unhappiness, and matrophobia, among others. She concludes with her classification of women’s writing into three phases that “establish[es] the continuity of the female tradition from decade to decade, rather than from Great Woman to Great Woman.”

Thus, Showalter traces the history of women's literature, suggesting that it can be divided into three phases:

1. The Feminine phase (1840–1880): Showalter sees the first phases taking place from roughly 1840 to 1880; she calls this “the Feminine phase” and declares that it is characterized by “women [writing] in an effort to equal the intellectual achievements of the male culture… The distinguishing sign of this period is the male pseudonym… [which] exerts an irregular pressure on the narrative, affecting tone, diction, structure, and characterization.”
2. The Feminist phase (1880–1920): The second, Feminist phase follows from 1880 to 1920, wherein “women are historically enabled to reject the accommodating postures of femininity and to use literature to dramatize the ordeals of wronged womanhood.” This phase is characterized by “Amazon Utopias,” visions of perfect, female-led societies of the future. This phase was characterized by women’s writing that protested against male standards and values, and advocated women’s rights and values, including a demand for autonomy.
3. The Female phase (1920— ) is one of self-discovery. Showalter says, “women reject both imitation and protest—two forms of dependency—and turn instead to female experience as the source of an autonomous art, extending the feminist analysis of culture to the forms and techniques of literature”. Significantly, Showalter does not offer a characteristic sign or figure for the Female phase, suggesting a welcome diversity of experience that is too broad to be encompassed in a single image.

Rejecting both imitation and protest, Showalter advocates approaching feminist criticism from a cultural perspective in the current Female phase, rather than from perspectives that traditionally come from an androcentric perspective like psychoanalytic and biological theories, for example. Feminists in the past have worked within these traditions by revising and criticizing female representations, or lack thereof, in the male traditions (that is, in the Feminine and Feminist phases). In her essay Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness (1981), Showalter says, "A cultural theory acknowledges that there are important differences between women as writers: class, race nationality, and history are literary determinants as significant as gender. Nonetheless, women’s culture forms a collective experience within the cultural whole, an experience that binds women writers to each other over time and space".

Conclusion: On the whole, we may conclude that her views on feminist poetics are intelligent, largely devoid of rhetorical extremities, and confidently provocative. Showalter speaks with calmly convincing authority, as one who firmly believes in the verity of what she’s saying. She is both earnest, in that she sees change needing to occur immediately, and patient, in that she expects that, given time enough, the wisdom and truth of her cause will prevail.

Additional Resources:

An extraordinary criticism of the dangers of trying to talk for those who have no voice in society. Why? Because it is extremely hard to truly understand what you have only heard about, and not experienced. Watch Macat’s short video for a great introduction to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”—one of the most important essays in the field of postcolonial studies ever written.

References:

• Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
• Eagleton, Mary, editor. Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader.
• Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination.
• Leitch, Vincent B., editor. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.
• Showalter, Elaine. ‘Toward a Feminist Poetics’. The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. London: Virago, 1986. 125- 143
• Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing.
• Showalter, Elaine. “Toward a Feminist Poetics,” was originally published in Mary Jacobus's anthology Women Writing and Writing about Women (1979)
•  Thompson, Zoë Brigley. The Midnight Heart. 'Toward a Feminist Poetics' by Elaine Showalter. << http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/towards_a_feminist/>
• Tolan, Fiona. Feminisms. An Oxford Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Patricia Waugh. OUP. 2006.
• Wikipedia contributors. "Elaine Showalter." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 12 Oct. 2013. Web. 27 Dec. 2022.
• Witalec, Janet. Ed. Introduction" Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 169. Gale Cengage 2003 eNotes.com 27 Dec, 2022 http://www.enotes.com/topics/elaine-showalter#critical-essays-showalter-elaine-introduction

Cleanth Brooks: The Language of Paradox (The Well Wrought Urn)

This is compiled from various web and book resources

Cleanth Brooks’s concept of Paradox and Irony and their importance in poetry as discussed in his essay “The Language of Paradox” in The Well Wrought Urn (1947).

“The language of poetry is the language of paradox” Elucidate with reference to Cleanth Brooks’s essay The Language of Paradox.

Cleanth Brooks - The Language of Paradox from Dilip Barad

In literature, the paradox is a literary device consisting of the anomalous juxtaposition of incongruous ideas for the sake of striking exposition or unexpected insight. It functions as a method of literary composition - and analysis - which involves examining apparently contradictory statements and drawing conclusions either to reconcile them or to explain their presence.

Cleanth Brooks, an active member of the New Critical movement, outlines the use of reading poems through paradox as a method of critical interpretation. Paradox in poetry means that tension at the surface of a verse can lead to apparent contradictions and hypocrisies. His seminal essay, "The Language of Paradox," lays out Brooks' argument for the centrality of paradox by demonstrating that paradox is “the language appropriate and inevitable to poetry." The argument is based on the contention that referential language is too vague for the specific message a poet expresses; he must “make up his language as he goes." This, Brooks argues, is because words are mutable and meaning shifts when words are placed in relation to one another.

In this essay ("The Language of Paradox,"), Cleanth Brooks emphasizes how the language of poetry is different from that of the sciences, claiming that he is interested in our seeing that the paradoxes spring from the very nature of the poet's language: “it is a language in which the connotations play as great a part as the denotations. And I do not mean that the connotations are important as supplying some sort of frill or trimming, something external to the real matter in hand. I mean that the poet does not use a notation at all--as a scientist may properly be said to do so. The poet, within limits, has to make up his language as he goes.”

In this passage, Brooks stresses that poetic language is inherently different from scientific language because the poet constructs his language as he goes and defines his own rules. The poet, then, has control over language, and must take an active role in the shaping of what literature means. The poet, then, is not limited to the denotations of words, but, instead,  revel in the possible connotations of words. The individual poet is given a great deal of power, then, in the process of knowledge making and the reader is isolated from the production of meaning.

Paradox:

In the writing of poems, paradox is used as a method by which unlikely comparisons can be drawn and meaning can be extracted from poems both straightforward and enigmatic.

Brooks points to William Wordsworth's poem “It is a beauteous evening, calm and free.” He begins by outlining the initial and surface conflict, which is that the speaker is filled with worship, while his female companion does not seem to be. The paradox, discovered by the poem’s end, is that the girl is more full of worship than the speaker precisely because she is always consumed with sympathy for nature and not - as is the speaker - in tune with nature while immersed in it.

In his reading of Wordsworth's poem, “Composed upon Westminster Bridge,” Brooks contends that the poem offers paradox not in its details, but in the situation which the speaker creates. Though London is a man-made marvel, and in many respects in opposition to nature, the speaker does not view London as a mechanical and artificial landscape but as a landscape comprised entirely of nature. Since London was created by man, and man is a part of nature, London is thus too a part of nature. It is this reason that gives the speaker the opportunity to remark upon the beauty of London as he would a natural phenomenon, and, as Brooks points out, can call the houses “sleeping” rather than “dead,” because they too are vivified with the natural spark of life, granted to them by the men that built them.

Brooks ends his essay with a reading of John Donne’s poem "The Canonization," which uses a paradox as its underlying metaphor. Using a charged religious term to describe the speaker’s physical love as saintly, Donne effectively argues that in rejecting the material world and withdrawing to a world of each other, the two lovers are appropriate candidates for canonization. This seems to parody both love and religion, but in fact it combines them, pairing unlikely circumstances and demonstrating their resulting complex meaning. Brooks points also to secondary paradoxes in the poem: the simultaneous duality and singleness of love, and the double and contradictory meanings of “die” in Metaphysical poetry (used here as both sexual union and literal death). He contends that these several meanings are impossible to convey at the right depth and emotion in any language but that of paradox. A similar paradox is used in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” when Juliet says “For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch and palm to palm is holy palmer’s kiss.”

Brooks' contemporaries in the sciences were, in the 40's and 50's, reorganizing university science curricula into codified disciplines. The study of English, however, remained less defined and it became a goal of the New Critical movement to justify literature in an age of science by separating the work from its author and reader, and by examining it as a self-sufficient artifact. In Brooks’s use of the paradox as a tool for analysis, however, he develops a logical case as a literary technique with strong emotional affect. His reading of “The Canonization” in “The Language of Paradox,” where paradox becomes central to expressing complicated ideas of sacred and secular love, provides an example of this development.

Irony

Although paradox and irony as New Critical tools for reading poetry are often conflated, they are independent poetical devices. Irony for Brooks is “the obvious warping of a statement by the context” whereas paradox is later glossed as “a special kind of qualification which involves the resolution of opposites.”

Irony functions as a presence in the text – the overriding context of the surrounding words that make up the poem. Only sentences such as 2 + 2 = 4 are free from irony; most other statements are prey to their immediate context and are altered by it (take, as an example, the following joke. "A woman walks into a bar and asks for a double entendre. The bartender gives it to her." This last statement, perfectly acceptable elsewhere, is transformed by its context in the joke to an innuendo) take their effect from it. Irony is the key to validating the poem because a test of any statement grows from the context – validating a statement demands examining the statement in the context of the poem and determining whether it is appropriate to that context.

Paradox, however, is essential to the structure and being of the poem. In The Language of Paradox (The Well Wrought Urn) Brooks shows that paradox was so essential to poetic meaning that paradox was almost identical to poetry. According to fellow New Critic Leroy Searle, Brooks’ use of paradox emphasized the indeterminate lines between form and content. “The form of the poem uniquely embodies its meaning” and the language of the poem “effects the reconciliation of opposites or contraries.” While irony functions within the poem, paradox often refers to the meaning and structure of the poem and is thus inclusive of irony. This existence of opposites or contraries and the reconciliation thereof is poetry and the meaning of the poem.

Criticism

R.S. Crane, in his essay "The Critical Monism of Cleanth Brooks," argues strongly against Brooks’ centrality of paradox. For one, Brooks believes that the very structure of poetry is paradox, and ignores the other subtleties of imagination and power that poets bring to their poems. Brooks simply believed that “’imagination’ reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities.” Brooks, in leaning on the crutch of paradox, only discusses the truth which poetry can reveal, and speaks nothing about the pleasure it can give. Also, by defining poetry as uniquely having a structure of paradox, Brooks ignores the power of paradox in everyday conversation and discourse, including scientific discourse, which Brooks claimed was opposed to poetry. Crane claims that, using Brooks’ definition of poetry, the most powerful paradoxical poem in modern history is Einstein’s formula E = mc², which is a profound paradox in that matter and energy are the same thing. The argument for the centrality of paradox (and irony) becomes a reductio ad absurdum and is therefore void (or at least ineffective) for literary analysis.

Woksheet: Screening Movie Adaptation of "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" - by Kenneth Branagh

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a 1994 American horror film directed and acted by Kenneth Branagh (as Victor Frankesntein) and starring Robert De Niro (as the Creature). The movie is considered to be the most faithful film adaptation of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus published in 1818.

The film begins with the narration in the voice of Mary Shelley: 

"I busied myself to think of a story which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror; one to make the reader dread to look around, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart."

~ Prepared by Heenaba Zala, visitng faculty, Dept. of English, M.K. Bhavnagar Univeristy, Bhavnagar, Gujarat - India ~

Pre-viewing tasks:

• ·        What is gothic scientific fiction?
• ·        What is a frame narrative?
• ·        What is the point of view of the author?
• ·        What are the viewpoints of different characters?
• ·        Do you have confusion about the title of the novel?
• ·        Who do you think is the real monster, the Creator or the Creature?
• ·        What is tabula rasa?
• ·        What is the significance of the subtitle "The Modern Prometheus"?
• ·        Do you think Mary Shelley's Frankenstein stands on the brick of revolutionary changes?

While viewing task:

• ·        How is the beginning and the end of the movie?
• ·        Do you feel the effect of horror in the movie?
• ·        What do you think about the character of the monster in the movie?
• ·        What do you think about the conversation between Victor and the monster?
• ·        Do you think that some scenes are omitted or replaced by other scene? How is the effect of these changes?
• ·        Do you think the director has used appropriate symbols in the movie?

Post-viewing tasks:

• ·        What is the difference between the movie and the novel?
• ·        Does the movie help you to understand narrative structure of the novel?
• ·        Do you think the movie is helpful to understand the viewpoints of different characters?
• ·        What do you think about the creation of lady monster in the novel and Elizabeth's look of a monster in the movie?
• ·        Think about Victor's acceptance of Elizabeth and rejection of the monster.
• Do you think the director is faithful to the novel?

All Students shall post thier responses to the post-viewing task as comment under the posting on Google Plus community of our Department.

The Cover Page of the Novel pub in 1818

Film Poster

Film Poster

Read A Film Review by James Berardinelli
Read an article on the Novel and the Movie
Examination of the Novel and the Film
Read Kenneth Branagh's Interview

Twitter: Chirp you way to Sweet Tweets

'One Hundred and Forty Characters in Seach of a Tweeter' can be an interesting retelling of Luigi Pirandello's Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore (Six Characters In Search of an Author). 
'Handle' (@), 'hashtag' (#), 'Retweet' (RT), 'Real Life Retweet' (RLRT) and 'Follow' (follower/following) are the Pandavas of this tweetekshetra. Curious to learn names of Kauravas? Click here.
Wanna play a role in this play? Here are some interesting tips to get ready for the twitheatre:

The Number One Mistake Everybody Makes on Twitter from Gary Vaynerchuk