Tuesday, November 28, 2023
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"સ્વસ્થ - ભારત મિશન"
"સ્વસ્થ - ભારત મિશન"
નમસ્કાર મિત્રો મારું નામ આશા રાઠોડ છે ,હું ભૂતેશ્વર (dis -Bhavnagar-364110, Gujrat) ગામમાં રહું છું અને હું MKBU યુનિવર્સિટીમાં મુખ્ય વિષય ઈંગ્લીશ સાથે M.A અભ્યાસ કરું છું . આ બ્લોગ આજે યોજાયેલ મેરેથોન વિશે છે જેમાં ઘણા બધા વિદ્યાર્થીઓ, યુવાનો તેમજ 15 વર્ષથી મોટા લોકોએ ભાગ લીધો હતો. મેરેથોના ભાગ સ્વરૂપે મેં પણ ભાગ લીધો હતો.આ મેરેથોન VRTI સંસ્થા દ્વારા યોજવામાં આવેલો હતો, જેના કાર્યકર્તા વાઘેલા સાહેબ, કિશોરસિંહ ગોહિલ ,તરુણભાઈ તેમજ એમની પુરી Agrocil સંસ્થા દ્વારા રાખવામાં આવ્યો હતો..
આ મેરેથોનો મુખ્ય હેતુ સ્વસ્થ ભારત મિશન નો હતો. મારા અને અમારા પુરા ભૂતેશ્વર ગામ વતી પુરી સંસ્થા નો ખુબ ખુબ આભાર કે તમે અમારા માટે આવી યોજના નું આયોજન કર્યું..
પરિચય:
VRTI - Vivekanand Research and Training Institute
Bhavnagar
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જેમાં વિજેતા સ્પર્ધકો
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Saturday, November 25, 2023
paper no 105 - History of English Literature – From 1350 to 1900 -Assignment
Assignment- Paper No: 105
This Blog is an Assignment of paper no.: 5 History of English Literature in this assignment I am dealing with the Beginning of English Literature Age: of Chaucer.
Name: Asha Rathod
Paper 105: History of English Literature – From 1350 to 1900
Subject Code: 22396
Topic Name: Age of Chaucer
Batch: M.A. Sem-1 (2023-25)
Roll No: 3
Enrollment No: 5108230038
Email Address: asharathod1451@gmail.com
Submitted to: Smt. S. B. Gardi, Department of English, MKBU
Age of Chaucer
Introduction:
Geoffrey Chaucer had a prodigious impact on the literature of English language. He was born in an age when French, being the language of aristocracy, dominated the country whereas English was nothing but the language of peasants and common folk. Chaucer elevated the status of English by establishing it as a literary language. Today he is revered as one of the greatest poets in English literature. The age during which Chaucer lived is called the Age of Chaucer
For a profound and comprehensive study of an author’s literary work is required, among other things, a thorough understanding of the age which produced and nurtured him. Without acquaintance with the historical context our evaluation and apprehension of literature is bound to be lop-sided, if not altogether warped and garbled. Every man is a child of his age. He is influenced by it though, if he is a great man, he may influence it also. A great writer like Shakespeare or Chaucer is generally said to be “not of an age, but of all ages.” But, in spite of his universal appeal, the fact remains that even he could not have escaped “the spirit of the age” in which he lived and moved and had his being. So, for understanding him and his works in their fullness it is imperative to familiarise ourselves with the influential currents of thought and feeling and sensibility (not to speak of the sociology politico-economic conditions) obtained in the times in which he flourished. Probably the Reverse of it is also true: we may acquire some understanding of these tendencies and currents, the ethos of the age, through the writer himself. Emphasising this point, W. H. Hudson says: “Every man belongs to his race and age; no matter how marked his personality, the spirit of his race and age finds expression through him” The same critic cogently expresses the relationship between history and literature. “Ordinary English history’ he says, “is our nation’s biography, its literature is its autobiography; in the ‘one we read the story of its actions and practical achievements; in the other the story of its intellectual and moral development.” Though Chaucer transcends the limits of his generation and creates something which is of interest to the future generation too, yet he represents much of what his age stands for. And therein lies his greatness. In the age of Chaucer, the Church became a hotbed of profligacy, corruption, and materialism. The overlord of the Church, namely, the Pope of Rome, himself had ambitions and aptitudes other than spiritual.
Background to the Age of Chaucer
In 1066 Normans conquered England after winning the Battle of Hastings. The Normans came from Normandy, a region in France.They spoke French and were led by William the Conqueror who became the first Norman King of England. After the Norman Conquest English started to decline and the literature written in English became scarce. During the Age of Chaucer English regained its lost stature and once again assumed its towering position
Chaucer’s Age-Both Medieval and Modern:
Chaucer’s age-like most historical ages-was an age of transition. This transition implies a shift from the medieval to the modern times, the emergence of the English nation from the dark ages' ' to the age of enlightenment. Though some elements associated with modernity were coming into prominence,-yet mostly and essentially the age was medieval-unscientific, superstitious, chivalrous, religious-minded, and “backward” in most respects. The fourteenth century, as J. M. Manly puts it in The Cambridge History of English Literature, was “a dark epoch of the history of England ''. However, the silver lining of modernity did “succeed in piercing, here and there, the thick darkness of ignorance and superstition. In fact, the age of Chaucer was not stagnant: it was inching its way steadily and surely to the dawn of the Renaissance and the Reformation, which were yet a couple of centuries ahead. We cannot agree with Kittredge who calls Chaucer’s age “a singularly modern time”. For that matter, not to speak of the fourteenth, even the eighteenth century was not “modern” in numerous respects. What we notice in the fourteenth century is the start of the movement towards the modern times, and not the accomplishment of that movement, which was going to be a march of marathon nature. Robert Dudley French observes: “It was an age of restlessness, amid the ferment of new life, that Chaucer lived and wrote. Old things and new appear side by side on his pages, and in his poetry we can study the essential spirit, both of the age that was passing and of the age that was to come.”What are these ‘old things and new:’ and what made the age restless? The answer will be provided if we discuss the chief events and features of the age.
The period between 1337 and 1453 is marked by a long succession of skirmishes between France and England, which are collectively known as the “Hundred Years War”. Under the able and warlike guidance of King Edward III (1327-1377) England won a number of glorious victories, particularly at Crecy, Portieres, and Encouraging. The French might have crumbled and Edward was once acknowledged even the king of France. But later, after his demise and with the succession of the incompetent Richard II, the English might waned and the French were able to secure tangible gains. The war influenced fie English character in the following two ways: The fostering of nationalistic sentiment; and The demolition of some social barriers between different classes of society. It was obviously natural for the conflict to have engendered among the English a strong feeling of national solidarity and patriotic fervour. But, as Compton-Rickett reminds us, “the fight is memorable not merely for stimulating the pride of English men.” It is important, too, for the second reason given above. It was not the aristocracy alone which secured the victory for England. The aristocracy was vitally supported by the lowly archers whose feats with the bow were a force to reckon with. Froissart, the French chronicler, referring to the English archers says: “They let their arrows fly so wholly together and so thick that it seemed snow”.
The Age of Chivalry:
Nevertheless, the dawn of the modern era was yet far away. Compton-Rickett observes: “Chaucer’s England is ‘Still characteristically medieval, and nowhere is the conservative feeling more strongly marked than in the persistence of chivalry. This strange amalgam of love, war, and religion so far from exhibiting any signs of decay, reached perhaps its fullest development at this time. More than two centuries were to elapse before it was finally killed-by the satirical pen of Cervantes.” The Knight in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is typical of his kind. Even the tale he narrates concerns the adventures of two true knights-Architect and Palamon
The Black Death:
Peasants’ Revolt and Labour Unrest In the age of Chaucer most people were victims of poverty, squalor, and pestilence. Even well educated nobles eyed soap with suspicion, and learned physicians often forbade bathing as harmful for health! That is why England was often visited by epidemics, especially plague. The severest attack of this dread epidemic came in 1348. It was called “the Black Death'' because black, knotty boils appeared on the bodies of the hopeless victims. It is estimated that about a million human beings were swept away by this epidemic. That roughly makes one-third of the total population of England at that time. One immediate consequence of this pestilence was the acute shortage of working hands. The socioeconomic system of England lay hopelessly paralysed. Labourers and villains who happened to survive started demanding much higher wages. But neither their employers nor the king nor Parliament was ready to meet these demands. A number of severe regulations were passed asking workers to work at the old rates of payment. This occasioned a great deal of resentment which culminated in the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 during the reign of Richard II. The peasants groaning under the weight of injustice and undue official severity were led to London by the Kentish priest John Ball. He preached the dignity of labour and asked the nobles: When Adam delved and Eve span Who was then the gentleman? The king, overawed by the mass of peasantry armed with such weapons as hatchets, spades, and pitchforks, promised reform but later shelved his promise. The “Peasants’ Revolt'' is, according to Compton-Rickett, “a dim foreshadowing of those industrial troubles that lay in the distant future.” Chaucer in his Nun’s Priest’s Tale refers in the following lines to Jack Straw who with Watt Tyler raised the banner of revolt: Certes, he Jake Straw and his meyne Ne made never shouts half so shrill, When that they wolden any Fleeing kill As thilke day was mad upon the fox. R. K. Root thus sums up the significance of this uprising: “This revolt, suppressed by the courage and good judgement of the boy King, Richard II, though barren of any direct and immediate result, exerted a lasting influence on the temper of the lower classes, fostering in them a spirit of independence which made them no longer a negligible quantity in the life of the nation''. This was another line of progress towards modernism.
Summary:
The fourteenth century, as J. M. Manly puts it in The Cambridge History of English Literature, which was “a dark epoch of the history of England”. Latin and French were the dominant languages in fourteenth-century England. Chaucer first appears in public records in 1357 as a member of the house of Elizabeth, Countess of ulster. In October 1385, Chaucer was appointed a justice of the peace for Kent, and in August 1386 he became knight of the shire for Kent.
Resources:
“The Age of Chaucer.” eGyanKosh, IGNOU, 2017, https://egyankosh.ac.in/handle/123456789/22134. Accessed 25 November 2023.
“Age of Chaucer – 14th Century.” RCS College Manjhaul, http://rcscollegemanjhaul.org/rcs/assets/uploads/assignment/assignment-1642497352-sms.pdf. Accessed 25 November 2023.
Khan, Asad, and Art Adams. “The Age of Chaucer: Assignment | PDF | Geoffrey Chaucer | The Canterbury Tales.” Scribd, https://www.scribd.com/document/436391062/The-Age-of-Chaucer-Subject-Classics-in-E-pdf. Accessed 25 November 2023.
Lumiansky, R.M.. "Geoffrey Chaucer". Encyclopedia Britannica, 6 Nov. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Geoffrey-Chaucer. Accessed 25 November 2023.
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Friday, November 24, 2023
Paper No: 104 - Literature of the Victorians -Assignment
Assignment- Paper No: 104
This Blog is an Assignment of Paper no.104 Literature of the Victorians. In this assignment I am dealing with the topic Thomas Hardy and Thematic Study of ‘Jude the Obscure’.
Information:
Name: Asha Rathod
Paper 104: Literature of the Victorians
Subject Code: 22395
Topic Name: Thomas Hardy and Thematic Study of ‘Jude the Obscure’
Batch: M.A. Sem-1 (2023-25)
Roll No: 3
Enrollment No: 5108230038
Email Address: asharathod1451@gmail.com
Submitted to: Smt. S. B. Gardi, Department of English, MKBU
Thomas Hardy and Thematic Study of ‘Jude the Obscure’
Thomas Hardy:
Thomas Hardy is best known for his novels, all of which were published in the mid- to late-19th century.
Hardy strongly believed in the incoherence of the empirical world. In his major fiction Hardy illustrated his personal philosophy of chance, a belief that chance, a blind force of Nature, can change man's destiny. Chance is for Hardy everything for which man has no control.
Hardy was not a philosopher, but certainly a philosophical novelist. His novels are in essence ethical reflections on both the universe and the social world.
The Universe is always present in his fiction. Hardy developed his ethical view of the universe in general, and of Victorian society in particular, in his early novels, Under the Greenwood Tree, A Pair of Blue Eyes, and in the major novels, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, as well as in his epic drama The Dynasts. Hardy's characters serve as metaphors for his tragic vision of the human condition.
To try to find answers from the man himself is an exercise in frustration. Hardy had a private and a public self, and one can only suspect which self is revealed at a particular moment. "Whatever was within him that gave him the dark cast. To his mind, he kept it well hidden, expressing it only as a philosophical pessimism. He was always polite and ironic. mask before the world, and never, as some writers have done, let it drop so that the real man might be seen and understood. " Even his " official biography" is elusive, for it was written by Hardy and typed under his supervision by his second wife, whose name appears as author. As Richard Carpenter has noted, "It is more interesting for what it conceals than for what it says." Descriptions of Hardy's personality contribute least of all to an elucidation of his intention.(Schwartz)
The scheme of Jude the Obscure was outlined in 1890 from notes made in 1887, some of the circumstances having been suggested by the death of a woman in the former year. The narrative was begun in 1892, written in full length from August 1893 onward into the next year , and was in the hands of the publisher by the end of 1894. Harper's Magazine began serialisation in November 1894, under the title "The Simple tons, "and continued with monthly instalments from January to November 1895, under the title " Heart Insurgent ."(Schwartz)
Specifically in the novel, Hardy depicts characters who raise questions about such things as religious beliefs, social classes, the conventions of marriage, and elite educational institutions and who feel in the absence of the old certainties that the universe may be governed by a mysterious, possibly malign power.
Hardy's Representation of Courage to Face the Harsh Reality in Light of Darwinism :
"Darwinism thinks that those who survive in the world are the fittest and those who fail to adapt themselves to the environment will perish. They believe that man has evolved from the lower forms of life and humans are special not because God created them but because they have successfully adapted to the changing environment. Conditions and have passed on their survival - making characteristics genetically".(Lu and Zhang)
In the novel Jude the Obscure, Darwin's theory of revolution is indeed widely applied in the description of the conflict between character and environment. And the theory of natural selection and survival of the fittest has a profound effect on the characters. The evolutionary storm that Darwin blew up in the Victorian age in Britain swept like a fresh wind through natural science and literature, bringing in its wake a new climate of intellectual and academic freedom that has grown with the passing years.
The themes of the novel are the struggle of the Victorian working class, religion and nonconformity, marriage and sexuality, and education.
Religion:
As a Christian allegory , Jude is a terrible indictment of Christianity and , particularly , Christianity as manifested in Victorian society . The Christian sacrifice is re - enacted in the society which some of its people thought the finest fruit of that sacrifice , and which now ignores or abets the death of Christ . Hardy is also trying to show how that sacrifice achieved nothing . The animal and unaspiring persist eternally , and it is to these that Christianity has geared itself. (Holland)
The references to the Bible , and more specifically to the book of Jude , are thus used negatively : Hardy brings out the idea of religious and ethical struggle in his here in order to refute society's pietistic stance. (Gray)
Religious hypocrisy is an important theme in the novel, in which men become priests simply because it is a comfortable career choice, not a vocation. There is a distinct absence of genuine religious feeling or experience in the novel; people use religion simply as a way to enforce society's rules and norms. Religion makes hypocrites of people because it forces them to despise and reject their natural urges (such as the desire for sex) and to violate natural morality: to leave partners who no longer suit them or make them miserable and to refrain from marrying unsuitable partners to establish paternity.
Marriage :
To see how the structure works, and specifically to see how marriage functions, let us return to the basic opposition between "civil law" and "law of nature."
But Hardy is interested not only in showing such casual floutings of the marriage laws, which in themselves may seem isolated and accidental occurrences dependent upon individual willful acts. Instead of simply showing how the act of marriage can be infelicitous, his real goal is to show that even when it is apparently felicitous - that is, when the recognized conventions governing the act of marriage have been properly invoked and performed - marriage is doomed to failure, because it promises to deliver something it can not. This he demonstrates through the two main marriages in the novel.(Goetz)
The marriage between Sue and Phillotson is more complicated. Phillotson represents an enlightened view when he lets Sue go to live with her soulmate, an action for which he is punished by a hypocritical society. Society cares much more about the letter than the spirit of the law ("the letter killeth") and upholds a superficial morality that negates people's deepest feelings. But the problem of marriage in Hardy's novel is intractable; even though Phillotson is willing to take Sue back as his wife, his complicity in her martyrdom is sure to destroy her. Going along with Sue helps him get back his livelihood and status in an unforgiving society.
In other words, Sue believes that women should be allowed to undo marriages that are clearly mistakes. She's also sure that lots of women feel this way, only they don't say so and Sue does. Unfortunately for Sue, she lives in the late nineteenth century, and the rules of her social environment won't let her live as she wants. Her insight into the ways that marriage will change over the twentieth century is almost dead on even though she are speaking in 1896, before the twentieth century even begins.
On the other hand, the real marriage of Jude and Sue causes people to persecute and ostracise them because the couple does not have a legal contract. The relentless hounding of the nonconformist couple results in them losing their livelihoods and relatively pleasant home in Aldbrickham. Their return to Christminster as paupers leads to the tragic destruction of their family.
Jude and Sue are in love but cannot marry because they are already married to other people. They live together and have children, but after their tragic deaths, they feel convicted of returning to their first spouses; Jude eventually dies, while Sue continues her loveless marriage.
Victorian Society:
Jude cannot gain entry into the university because he has not had access to schools that teach Greek and Latin, and his efforts at self-study are not enough for him to catch up.The brutality of an impenetrable class system haunts Jude, who has the misfortune to be born into the working class.
Jude, though born into the working class, has big hopes of social and class mobility. He dreams of the kind of education and the kind of social and financial success from which those of his class are too often barred. But Jude's impoverished background is not so easily shaken.
An orphan raised by his aunt, Jude learns that his classical academic pursuits have all been for nothing: he's studied the wrong things. His head is stuffed with useless and probably incorrect information, and, what's worse for the scholars of Christminster, he has neither the resources nor the 'breeding' to become a scholar. He's, quite simply, not the right class and, all too often in Victorian England, the class in which you're born is the class in which you remain.
Conversely, the truly loving relationship between Sue and Jude is destroyed because it exists outside of marriage which is not accepted in society. The social condemnation and ostracism they incur ravage what might otherwise have been a very happy family. Sue, Jude, and their children are brutalised, and made hungry and homeless, through the scorn levelled against them.
Conclusion:
“Of course no text, however hard it tries, stands free within its frame. But Jude the obscure rejoices in its enlargement.” -John Goode
Hardy’s treatment of the problems does not simply address the issues of Victorian era but is applicable to a larger extent to modern society. Hardy succeeds in giving his message, instead of being severely criticised by his contemporary writers and critics, for proposing the free approach towards life.
Jude the Obscure can be treated as one of Hardy’s contribution to the marriage question that deals marriage as a concerned problem in contemporary society.
At last I say these three themes of 'Jude the Obscure' are connected with each other in that time and also in contemporary time.
Resources:
Goetz, William R. “The Felicity and Infelicity of Marriage in Jude the Obscure.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 38, no. 2, 1983, pp. 189–213. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3044789. Accessed 25 Nov. 2023.
Gray, Carol Grever. “Essay: JUDE AND THE ‘NEW’ MORALITY.” Newsletter of the Conference on Christianity and Literature, vol. 19, no. 2, 1970, pp. 14–20. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26331905. Accessed 25 Nov. 2023.
Holland, Norman. “‘Jude the Obscure’: Hardy’s Symbolic Indictment of Christianity.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 9, no. 1, 1954, pp. 50–60. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3044291. Accessed 25 Nov. 2023.
Lu, Guorong, and Zhehui Zhang. “On the Theme of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure.” English Language and Literature Studies, 20 Aug. 2019, https://doi.org/10.5539/ells.v9n3p15. Accessed 25 Nov. 2023.
Schwartz, Barry N. “Jude the Obscure in the Age of Anxiety.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 10, no. 4, 1970, pp. 793–804. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/449715.Accessed 25 Nov. 2023.
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