Tuesday, 20 September 2022

Thinking Activity : The Home and the world

The Home and the world by Rabindranath Tagore 


Rabindranath Tagore's novel The Home and the World (1916) is set in India during the early twentieth century, a time when England still held power over the country. Tagore writes each chapter from the perspective of either Nikhil, Bimala, or Sandip to reflect the political turmoil and lack of unity in India at the time the novel is set.


The Home and the World is set during the height of the Swadeshi movement, a boycott of British goods that was initiated in 1905 as a protest against Great Britain’s arbitrary division of Bengal into two parts. At first, Tagore was one of the leaders of Swadeshi, but when protests evolved into violent conflicts between Muslims and Hindus, Tagore left the movement. In The Home and the World, he explained why he did not approve of what Swadeshi had become.


 Rabindranath Tagore  


Born :-7 May 1861 

Died :- 7 August 1941

                       Robindronath Thakur was a Bengali polymath – poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter.His pen name is Bhanusingha. He reshaped Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse" of Gitanjali, he became in 1913 the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. 

                 Tagore's poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal. He is sometimes referred to as "the Bard of Bengal". 

Write up  

Hindi language 

जो मन की पीड़ा को 

स्पष्ट रूप से नहीं कह सकते

उन्हीं को अधिक क्रोध  आता है 

Translate Gujarati language 

જે મનની પીડાને સ્પષ્ટ 

રૂપમાં ન કહી શકતા હોય 

તેને જ વધારે ક્રોધ આવે છે 

Translate Bengali language 

যে মনের কষ্ট স্পষ্টভাবে প্রকাশ করতে পারে না সে রেগে যায় 


Monday, 19 September 2022

Thinking Activity : The CS and Feminism Cub

 Cyberfeminism AI and Gender Biases 



Cyberfeminism is a feminist approach which foregrounds the relationship between cyberspace, the Internet, and technology. ... The term was coined in the early 1990s to describe the work of feminists interested in theorizing, critiquing, exploring and re-making the Internet, cyberspace and new-media technologies in general. 

1. Kirti Sharma: How to keep human bias out of AI?  

In this video Kirti Sharma talk about human bias regarding AI. Emotion and bias have always been one of the most controversial topics of AI. That is because of an unintentional premonition due to bias in training data. Furthermore, things like sexist/racist steps taken by humans have a similar effect on AI models.

Although we can control AI in today’s date, its power will rise dramatically in the future. If we embed a bias in current AI systems, then it’ll leave us with two options.

To redesign complete technology.

To surrender the minorities up to decisions made by AI.

Therefore, it's completely up to us whether we want to keep human bias away from it or not. 

2. Robin Hauser: Can we protect AI from our biases?

I think yes. Because I am a girl. So my protraction is my first priority . I am not using some of apps with my number and my name. Because one fear in mind any misuse this information.As humans we're inherently biased. Sometimes it's explicit and other times it's unconscious, but as we move forward with technology how do we keep our biases out of the algorithms we create? Documentary filmmaker Robin Hauser argues that we need to have a conversation about how AI should be governed and ask who is responsible for overseeing the ethical standards of these supercomputers. "We need to figure this out now," she says. "Because once skewed data gets into deep learning machines, it's very difficult to take it out."AI makes all decisions like banking work etc. she gives her point of view that I believe in Technology.

Our experience of cyber space and women's identity.

So for understanding these spaces of biases of AI. So as Kriti mentioned when she first applied for AI she received comments and queries. It’s about gender biases. In this similar way when any girl puts her own identity she might receive queries first from there family members, importantly males of the family. If the same thing happened to us we have to observe such things. Like till the date some girls have not their own Gmail Id, Facebook Id and so many things. So patriarchy is also described. Women or girls make a fake Id on Facebook to hide their gender because they don’t want any kind of hurdles. 

Cyberfeminism is a very interesting term for discussing and thinking. It's very interesting to see that still some women are facing some kind of problem Technology with social media and they are getting afraid of using such a thing. So we have to write our own experience about cyber feminism. I had the same experience when I started Facebook, Instagram so at that time I hid my profile and my identity because I was afraid that I might be talking wrong. Slowly and steadily we are coming out from this kind of fear. 


Sunday, 18 September 2022

Flipped learning - Prose writers and poets

Questions and Answer 

Task - 1 Three Prose writers 

1 ) According to Radhakrishnan what is the function of philosophy ? 

Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888-1975) was born on September 5, 1888 at Tiruttani (Madras Presidency), a noted pilgrim centre in South India. At the Madras Christian College when he was hesitant about the choice of his subject, a cousin of him, who took a degree that year, gave him his textbooks of philosophy. 

This helped Radhakrishnan to decide his future vocation. He served his apprenticeship as a Professor of Philosophy and he worked hard with his Sanskrit scholars. His success as a teacher was due to his great learning and his gift of lucid exposition. From Mysore, he went to Calcutta to hold one of the most highly prized University assignments – the King George V Chair of Mental & Moral Philosophy. For more than 20 years he was closely associated with the Calcutta University. 

2) write a note on S Radhakrishnan 's perspective on Hinduism . 

Radhakrishnan starts off by confronting the classic question of what Hinduism actually is. This, he does not answer directly, for a very good reason: Hinduism isn’t an internally recognized word, but a name given to the sub-continent of India by outsiders. Later, it was recognized by Hindus as being a practicable working name. This was because India, despite being diverse, had a common history, literature and civilization.

The backbone of Hindu culture and beliefs is the Vedas. Faith is the vision of the soul where the spiritual part of the world is apprehended, just as the material world is apprehended via the physical senses. The mind has two powers, reason and intuition. Reason correlates with the physical senses, intuition with faith. The Vedas are a collection of the intuitions of the soul, which became the spiritual intuitions which founded the cohesive Hinduism we now know. These intuitions have a perennial value because “the truths revealed in the Vedas are capable of being re-experienced on compliance with ascertained conditions

Hindus believe that there are different paths to God, and each individual has their own path. This is one of the reasons why there are many different books to learn from, not just the Vedas, but the Puranas, Ramayana, Mahabharata, to name a few. The reason why it is thought that each person has their own path to God is that religious experience cannot be made objective. Instead, our path to God is crafted from how we are disposed to experience God, therefore we all have a different experience of what God is, and a different path to God. 

Task - 2 New  poets 

1) write a note on how Kaikini differs from other Indian poets in his poems 

In an introduction to Dots and Lines, an English translation of Kaikini’s short stories, critic C.N. Ramachandran writes, “To understand Jayant’s works, we have to situate him in the literary context of the last two decades of the 20th century. During that period, there arose a group of writers who consciously differed from both the earlier Modernist writers (called Navya in Kannada) and those contemporaneous to them, the Writers of Protest (called Bandaya in Kannada) and Dalit writers. They did not subscribe to any particular philosophical or political system of thinking – be it Existentialism of the Modernists or the Leftist ideologies of the Dalit and Protest writers. On the other hand, what they wished to do was to select precise and authentic details of daily life and organise them in such a way as to culminate in a particular experience . . . Generally, their style was comic-ironic; and the language they used was the spoken language of day-to-day life. They were neither idealists nor cynics; they just wished to observe the life around them – generally mediocre – to register all the fleeting details that marked an ordinary man’s daily routine, and lead up to an experience rich in connotations. Jayant was a major figure in this group of writers who, loosely, can be called ‘post-modernist’.”

The selection of poems in this edition brings to my mind a certain affinity with the work of the late bilingual poet, Arun Kolatkar. There is a similar use of an incisive non-decorative idiom, a keen observation of the singular, the quotidian and the unremarkable

2 ) write a critical note on the poems by Nissim Ezekiel 

Nissim Ezekiel's collected poems were first anthologized in 1992 by Oxford India Paperbacks. Since then, Oxford University Press has published three impressions and two editions of the anthology. The second edition, published in 2007, contains a preface by Leela Gandhi and an introduction by John Thieme. The collection contains all of Ezekiel's major published work from 1952 to 1988. The anthology includes every work that Ezekiel has published in those years, including the collections A Time to Change (1952), Sixty Poems (1953), The Third (1958), The Unfinished Man (1960), The Exact Name (1965), Hymns in Darkness (1976), and Latter-Day Psalms (1982). The Collected Poems also include poems from stretches of time in which Ezekiel did not publish his poetry in specific collections: Poems (1965-1974), Poems Written in 1974, and Poems (1983-1988).

When read from cover to cover, the Collected Poems show Ezekiel's evolution as a poet from the ages of 28 to 62. Ezekiel's early work is very concerned with form and contains strict rhyme and meter schemes. Additionally, they are all written in "proper" English and place themselves witwrihin a Western literary tradition. As Ezekiel aged, his focus shifted towards his home country, India, and his poems become much more local and specific. Additionally, about halfway through his career, Ezekiel made the choice to move away from using strict poetic form in his poetry. As the form loosened in his poems, so did the register. Ezekiel's free verse flows with ease and confidence in his later work. 

Task - 3 conclusion  

1) write a note on the changing treads in post independence Indian writing in English 

Post-Independence Indian English fiction is virtually synonymous with Post-colonial Indian English fiction. The visibility of Indian English fiction dates back to the fourth decade of the twentieth century when Mulk Raj Anand, R.K.Narayan and Raja Rao published their novels in English. 

Anand’s Untouchable (1935) and Coolie (1936), Narayan’s Swami and Friends (1935) and Bachelor of Arts (1936) and Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) are the pioneering Indian English novels based on socio-political realism. Then came the partition of the sub-continent and a number of significant novels on the theme of partition were published. They include Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956), B.Rajan’s The Dark Dancer (1959), Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) and Manohar Malgaonkar’s A Bend in the Ganges (1964)

If we take a look at the trends in Indian English fiction, we will be struck by realism that underlies this genre in the post-Independence period. We come across five broad types of realism – social realism, psychological realism, historical realism, mythical realism and magic realism in Indian English fiction. Women novelists like Kamala Markandaya, Nayantara Sehgal and Shashi Deshpande lay emphasis on social realism and family relationship. Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve and A Handful of Rice deal with stark social realism depicting how the transition in the society affects family relationship. The women in women’s fiction seeks an identity of her own, independent of her husband. Shiv K. Kumar has rightly observed this with reference to Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence 

In That Long Silence, Jaya the protagonist, resents the image of a wife ‘yoked’ to her husband – ‘a pair of bullocks yoked together’. This is the image that haunts her all the time. So married to Mohan – a sedate, well-placed business executive – she secretly wishes to savour existential freedom through some disaster befalling him. So she feels ‘relieved’ when he is charged with embezzlement and they have to live in a sort of hide-out. She now feels redeemed as a woman with an identity of her own, seeing her husband rudderless and pathetically dependent upon her – this man whose ‘fastidiousness, passion for neatness and order had amazed me when married

2 ) How do the  writers of post independence Indian writing in English try to project the image of mother India or national identity in their writings ? 

Indian English literature also referred to as Indian Writing in English  is the body of work by writers in India who write in the English language and whose native or co-native language could be one of the numerous languages of India. Its early history began with the works of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio and Michael Madhusudan Dutt followed by Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo.[citation needed] R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao contributed to the growth and popularity of Indian English fiction in the 1930s.[1] It is also associated, in some cases, with the works of members of the Indian diaspora who subsequently compose works in English.

It is frequently referred to as Indo-Anglian literature. (Indo-Anglian is a specific term in the sole context of writing that should not be confused with Anglo-Indian). Although some Indo-Anglian works may be classified under the genre of postcolonial literature, the repertoire of Indian English literature encompasses a wide variety of themes and ideologies, from the late eighteenth-century to the present day, and thereby eludes easy categorization.

Thursday, 8 September 2022

Thinking Activity : Marxist, Ecocritical,Feminist and Queer criticism

 Marxist Ecocritical Feminist and Queer Criticism

Marxist

Definition 

Marxism is both a social and political theory, which encompasses Marxist class conflict theory and Marxian economics. Marxism was first publicly formulated in the 1848 pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which lays out the theory of class struggle and revolution. Marxian economics focuses on the criticisms of capitalism, which Karl Marx wrote about in his 1867 book, Das Kapital.

It originally consisted of three related ideas: a philosophical anthropology, a theory of history, and an economic and political program. There is also Marxism as it has been understood and practiced by the various socialist movements, particularly before 1914. Then there is Soviet Marxism as worked out by Vladimir Ilich Lenin and modified by Joseph Stalin, which under the name of Marxism-Leninism (see Leninism) became the doctrine of the communist parties set up after the Russian Revolution (1917). Offshoots of this included Marxism as interpreted by the anti-Stalinist Leon Trotsky and his followers, Mao Zedong’s Chinese variant of Marxism-Leninism, and various Marxisms in the developing world. There were also the post-World War II nondogmatic Marxisms that have modified Marx’s thought with borrowings from modern philosophies, principally from those of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger but also from Sigmund Freud and others. 

Marxism and Literature

    Chernyshevsky, who lived before Marx laid the foundation of Marxist theory on literature. He developed a purely materialistic view of art that placed art subordinate to reality. He believed that the highest beauty is that which man sees in the world and not that which is created by art. He viewed art only as an empty amusement. The basic premise of Marx’s view on art is not much different. Marx views art as subordinate to society. It is just “one of the forms of social consciousness”. Marx also believes that “art is not created in a vacuum”. It needs a society for its existence. 

       Marx and Engels authored another work – The German Ideology (1845 –46) – that brings out some other important concepts of Marxism; especially connected to ideology. The dominant ideology of any period is the product of the socio-economic structure of that period. That is to say, ideology originates from class-relations and class-interests. Ideology is a ‘superstructure’ with its ‘base’ in contemporary economic system. Literature is part of the cultural ideology and therefore it is only a ‘superstructure 

What Marxist critics do

1. They make a division between the 'overt' (manifest or surface) and 'covert' (latent or hidden) content of a literary work (much as psychoanalytic critics do) and then relate the covert subject matter of the literary work to basic Marxist themes, such as class struggle, or the progression of society through various historical stages, such as, the transition from feudalism to industrial capitalism. Thus, the conflicts in King Lear might be read as being 'really' about the conflict of class interest between the rising class (the bourgeoisie) and the falling class (the feudal overlords). 

2. Another method used by Marxist critics is to relate the context of a work to the social-class status of the author. In such cases an assumption is made (which again is similar to those made by psychoanalytic critics) that the author is unaware of precisely what he or she is saying or revealing in the text. 

3. A third Marxist method is to explain the nature of a whole literary genre in terms of the social period which 'produced' it. For instance, The Rise of the Novel, by Ian Watt, relates the growth of the novel in the eighteenth century to the expansion of the middle classes during that period. The novel 'speaks' for this social class, just as, for instance, Tragedy 'speaks for' the monarchy and the nobility, and the Ballad 'speaks for' for the rural and semi-urban 'working class'. 

4. A fourth Marxist practice is to relate the literary work to the social assumptions of the time in which it is 'consumed', a strategy which is used particularly in the later variant of Marxist criticism known as cultural materialism. 

Queer Theory 


Queer Theory is field of critical theory that emerged in early 1990s. Feminist challenges to the idea that gender is part of essential self and upon gay and lesbian studies close examination of the society constructed nature of sexual act and identities. Feminism was contrast between sex and gender - Queer Theory offers the view that all identities are social construction.  

What is Queer Theory : 

n approach to literary and cultural studies that rejected traditional categories of gender and sexuality critical theory that emerged in 1990s. It is not only sexual desire but it is emotional desire. Queer Theory does not concern itself exclusively with homosexuality - it is about all forms of identity. 

What lesbian/gay critic do?

1. Identify lesbian/gay episodes in mainstream work and discuss them as such (for example, the relationship between Jane and Helen in Jane Eyre), rather than reading same-sex pairings in non-specific ways, for instance, as symbolising two aspects of the same character (Zimmerman). 

2 . Set up an extended, metaphorical sense of 'lesbian/gay' so that it connotes a moment of crossing a boundary, or blurring a set of categories. All such 'liminal' moments mirror the moment of selfidentification as lesbian or gay, which is necessarily an act of conscious resistance to established norms and boundaries.  

Example : 

Dostana movie  


The act of sex is rarely seen, let alone alluded to, despite how sexual the movies can seem with bare-waisted women and shirtless men are dancing about every ten minutes or so. Until I did some research, I honestly did not think there were any Indian (Bollywood or not) movies which positively portrayed homosexuality. I mean, homosexual intercourse between consenting adults was decriminalized in India in July 2009 (one and a half years ago). So, where does one go to figure out what queer Bollywood films are out there and popular? Well, I go to my family, and the only movie they thought of as having gay characters or themes was Dostana from 2008.

Assignment 210 Dessertation Conclusion

 Paper - 210 Name - Nehalba Gohil Roll no - 15  Topic :- Feminist Approach in Kamala Das's Poems  Enrollment no - 4069206420210009 Email...