Posts

Asleep in the Valley (Questions & Answers)

Asleep in the Valley “And death is sleep – oh, sleep, sleep, sleep, undisturbed sleep!” _ A defeated soldier in G. B. Shaw’s Arms and the Man Title: A title serves its purpose mostly when it represents the content, heightens the theme, extends the purview of meaning, arouses aesthetic sensibilities, and above all, helps one realize the figurative point of view conceived at the core. “Asleep in the Valley”, being the title of the poem, says somebody is asleep in a valley – the event as well as the scene is thus laid out. The title lays stress on what the poem focuses upon – “Asleep”. The very word “Asleep” assumes wider connotation as the marks of bullet-wounds are mentioned. Besides, “Asleep in the Valley” aesthetically and ironically serves what “Dead in the Valley” could not have. Moreover, the title ironically oozes out the latent pathos that lurks behind the term ‘asleep’ as against the brutal backdrop of war; especially when it is eternalized in the sense of
Post a Comment
Read more

THE EYES HAVE IT (Questions & Answers)

THE EYES HAVE IT Ruskin Bond 1.       Comment on the title of the story, The Eyes Have It. Ø   The story lies in the eyes of the protagonist. Ironically, these eyes do not have the power to see beyond. Scientifically, the physical eyes are only media through which the mind sees. Both the narrator and the girl play the mind game sans their eyes, yet, paradoxically, taking their eyes in. Thus, ‘seeing’ becomes the pivot around which the theme of the story revolves. The title connotes differently since what the eyes have cannot be fathomed easily – whether “it” is seeing or blindness, mind game or ignorance, imagination or reality. Indeed, it truly reflects the trivia the story seems to achieve. The narrator declares, “I was totally blind”, and he goes on to ask the girl, “What is it like outside?” and “Have you noticed ...?”. But his eyes, which are “sensitive only to light and darkness”, receive an insight when the new passenger says, “It was her eyes I noticed
Post a Comment
Read more

Precursors of Romanticism

v   Who are the precursors of romanticism? Examine how they heralded the Age of Romanticism in their writings? ***   A few but noted writers who belonged to the transitional period between the Age of Classicism and Age of Romanticism are credited with sowing the seeds of romanticism, paving the way for Lyrical Ballads (1798) to usher in an effervescent, effusive literary era. The worthy contributors are namely James Thomson, William Collins, Thomas Gray, William Cowper, George Crabbe, Robert Burns, William Blake and, even, Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Oliver Goldsmith. Starting from Rousseau’s breakaway philosophy the air of romanticism was gathering momentum as, in the second half of the 18 th century, English literature experienced an inclined departure from the avowed rigidity of classicism, although not entirely. Be it the graveyard school of English poetry of the 1740s or   Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and other sentimental novels or the “novel of sensibi
Post a Comment
Read more

University Wits

v   Comment on the plays written immediately before Shakespeare. Or Write an essay on the contributions of the University Wits towards the making of Elizabethan drama. ü   The days of Moralities and Interludes were nearly over; and drama was taking shape out of the elements of comedy, tragedy, farce, morality, tragic-comedy – all rolled into one play. In the last quarter of the sixteenth century, the awakened ‘humanistic’ learning of the age produced its first learned masters who deftly mirrored the variegated dramatic ferventness of man in their plays. They were staging the theatre for one maestro, William Shakespeare; and they were adding fermentable emotions and passionate language to the classical form hitherto practised in English. They were ‘University Wits’, as George Saintsbury grouped them, and the prominent playwrights were, namely, Christopher Marlowe , Robert Greene , and Thomas Nashe from Cambridge, and John Lyly , Thomas Lodge , George Peele from Oxford. Thom
Post a Comment
Read more