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Modernist Literature.

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Bhumi Dangi

Department of English, MK Bhavnagar University

Semester-3 Assignment

Paper 12 – English Language teaching

‘Sociolinguistics’ by Sandra Silberstein

n  What is sociolinguistic?

People basically use language to communicate, to pass the message internally. We can think of a language as a kind of software installed in each n every social individual to get connected amongst each other. So generally, we can see that any kind of study which is related/based on the subject ‘Language’ is called ‘Linguistics’. Another term to take into consideration is ‘socio’. As we all know that a man is not just an individual but ‘A Social Individual’. We cannot take human being as a separate entity because one person is connected so well with others that s/he becomes a social individual.

Outside the world one person is connected with so many people that one has to communicate with different kind of people. And we have to play the role.

    Impact.

Sustained interest in sociolinguistics emerged in the 1960s, in part as a reaction to ‘autonomous’ linguistics. In place of latter’s idealised speaker/hearer, for whom social influences are irrelevant, the ‘hyphenated’ field of sociolinguistics sought to explore the language use of social beings. Capturing the interdisciplinary nature of the enterprise, a distinction is often made between micro-sociolinguistics & macro-sociolinguistics. Micro-sociolinguistics refers to research with a linguistic slant, often focusing on dialect and register variation. Both quantitative and qualitative research methods have been employed to explore such linguistic phenomena as phonological differences between dialects or discourse variation between male and female speakers. He refers to micro-sociolinguistics as ‘social dimensions of language’. In contrast, macro-sociolinguistics looks at the behaviour of entire speech communities,

exploring issues such as why immigrant communities retain their native language in some social contexts but not in others, or how social identity can affect language choice. With the coming-together of micro-sociolinguistics in a narrow sense and macro-sociology of language, we have tools and questions of particular interest to second language practitioners.

This section explores those aspects of socio-linguistic research that have been particularly productive when viewed through the lens of L2 teaching and learning. For convenience’s sake, this work will be discussed within three subcategories.

Language variation

Linguistic relativity

Languages in contact

1.     Language variation.

One of the earliest studies reported the work of Labov and his colleagues among inner-city youth in York City. Far from being ‘sloppy or ungrammatical’ -as was the prevailing stereotype – the language used by these speakers was shown to be as consistent and rule-governed as any ‘standard’ or ‘prestige’ dialect, the result of systematic linguistic and historical processes. The dissemination of Labov’s insights within the native language teaching profession had a profound effect. In 1979, as a result of court testimony by linguists including Labov and Smitherman, a US federal judge, in what is variously termed the ‘Ann Arbor’ or ‘King’ cases, ruled in favour of a group of parents by requiring that the school district first identify children speaking so-called black English – today more commonly termed African Vernacular English or Ebonics – and then use linguistic knowledge to teach these students how to read ‘standard English’. A significant outcome was that teachers were schooled in the origin and history of students’ native language variety and trained to recognise and address the systematic differences between this variety and standard or prestige form. Briefly pidginisation is a process that results from contact of two or more languages in a context where language needs can or must be satisfied through use of a simplified code. Examples include trading contexts or the interactions between colonised people and a conqueror. When social dominance comes into play, the

languages of subordinated groups have most of their effect on the grammar, while the socially dominant language contributes more of the vocabulary. Through the creolisation process, speakers develop an elaborated code that can accommodate the full range of life’s functions. A gradual decreolisation process can occur as speakers incorporate features from dominant language. During 1970s, a number of linguists came to argue that AAVE usage exists on a decreolisation continuum between creoles such as Gullah and a prestige from termed Standard American English. More recently, creolisation models in general have been complicated somewhat to acknowledge multidimensional linguistic influences and the dynamic virtuosity of learners’ language use. Pedagogically speaking, variation research has demonstrated the ways in which students’ home languages enrich the linguistic landscape, are fundamental to their identities and can be used to aid their learning. The examination of languages in contact and, in particular, the pidginisation model was to have an important influence on L2 studies.

For L2 researchers, the notion of a continuum between a first language and a ‘target language’ proved productive. A learner’s simplified interlanguage – a concept developed by Corder and Selinker – could be seen to result from pidginisation process. In this model, acquisition takes place through the processes of depidginisation: Schumann argued that social and psychological distance explain those learners whose speech remains simplified. A re-theorising of social distance appears at the end of this chapter.

Language variation research has focused increasingly on issues of social context, departing from early interpretations which tended to see meaning inhering in linguistic features themselves. For example, the observations of Lakoff were often interpreted to suggest that woman’s use of tag questions and hedges per se rendered them linguistically less powerful. In the area of social class, debate centred on Bernstein’s suggestion that the less ‘elaborated’, so-called ‘restricted’, code he reported for working-class students implied a cognitive deficit. Later thinking suggests a more dynamic process in which context and category reproduce each other through speech.  Tag questions of themselves don’t create a less powerful speaker, do they? And discourse styles do not necessarily imply cognitive ability. Rather, in a school context where working class students encounter middle-class teachers, or in contexts where gender relations are unequal, roles are reproduced through contextualised activities.

Perhaps one of the most important findings of contemporary sociolinguistic research is the extent to which social categories interact. Examples are studies of the commonly held stereotypes that women speak more grammatically and are more polite than men. This research shows us the extent to which social context is implicated in language use. An early study by Nichols reports a case where gender and social class interact with respect to grammatically. Working with socioeconomic group . . . exhibited more conservative linguistic behaviour than men in that group; women in the more socially mobile . . . community exhibited more innovative linguistic behaviour than . . . men. Building on this observation, Nichols underscores the contextual nature of language use when she speculates that ‘perhaps in transitional groups, or in different social situations for the same group, women will exhibit both conservative and innovative behaviour.

A wide variety of ways in which language and society intersect – in which we find social stratification of linguistic variables from phonology and syntax to discourse and narrative conversations – is documented in sociolinguistic research on:

    Age

    Ethnicity

    Gender

    Geography

    Profession

    Sexual identity

    Social class

Linguistic Relativity

Research on cross-cultural miscommunication explores communicative failures occasioned by the fact that seemingly equivalent language can function quite differently in different cultures. Thomas distinguishes between what she calls pragmalinguistic and sociopragma failure. In the former, speakers fail to convey their meaning because the message’s pragmatic force is misunderstood. A speaker might translate something from an L1 into a target language without the knowledge that the communicative conventions of the target language are quite different. For example, the pragmatic failure occurs when one does not know what to say to whom, a situation that can lead appropriately asked of newcomers and which topics are

discussed, which questions are appropriately asked of newcomers and which favours one asks differ dramatically across speech communities. For students from many locations outside the US it is odd that American hosts offer food only once and then take it away.

Hymes coined the term ethnography of speaking to describe the task of the researcher who is ‘concerned with the situations and uses, the patterns and functions, of speaking. As he says, ‘it is a question of what a foreigner must learn about a group’s verbal behaviour in order to participate appropriately and effectively in its activities’. In effect, the task of the researcher becomes the description and canale theorised four components of communicative competence: grammatical competence, discourse competence, strategic competence and socio linguistic competence. The last involves appropriate knowledge use based on knowledge of socio cultural conventions and social context. Socio linguistic knowledge involves sensitivity to issues of context and topic, as well as social parameters such as gender, age, social status.

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Bhumi Dangi.

Department of English, MK Bhavnagar University

Semester-3 Assignment

Paper- 11 Postcolonial literature

‘Subaltern cannot speak by Gayatri spivak & Commonwealth literature does not exist by Salman Rushdie – merging the theories and trying to see what emerges out of it.’

Commonwealth Literature, Post-Colonial Literature in English, New Literature in English, World Writing in English – these are just some of the terms being used to describe the writings of ‘members’ of the former British Empire.

The number of titles, however, reflects the growing international importance of such writings as evidenced this month at the London Festival of Commonwealth Literature, with writers coming from around the globe. They tentatively include Michael Ondaatje, the Sri Lankan- Canadian author of ‘The English Patient’, the book that inspired the movie that swept the board at the latest Acadaemy Awards ceremony.

The nine-day festival, sponsored by the Commonwealth Foundation and the University of London among others, will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Commonwealth Writers Prize and mark the Year of the Commonwealth in Britain.

It is an important milestone because many universities around the world now have courses in Commonwealth Literature, or some similar nomenclature, and academics are churning out books seemingly at the same pace as the fiction writers, poets and dramatists. Professors who teach the subject say that students who want to study English Literature are increasingly interested in the works coming from the English-speaking Caribbean, Africa, Canada and South-East Asia.

But what IS Commonwealth Literature? Many years after the term came into being, it still causes disagreement, according to Professor Hena Maes-Jelinek, a Belgian expert on the writing from Britain’s former colonies.

In a recent lecture at the Free University of Brussels, Maes- Jelinek said that writers often find the term limiting since it implies a uniform kind of literature and also tends to categorise this writing as outside the British mainstream.

In a famous and scathing essay, the Indian-born writer Salman Rushdie, author of the Satanic Verses and Midnight’s Children, once asserted that “Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist”, and he has been supported in this view by other authors.

“Isn’t this the very oddest of beasts… a school of literature whose supposed members deny vehemently that they belong to it? Worse these denials are simply disregarded! It seems the creature has taken on a life of its own,” Rushdie has written.

He added that the nearest definition of Commonwealth literature he could get sounded patronising because it appeared to be “that body of writing created … in the English language, by persons who are not themselves white Britons, or Irish, or citizens of the United States of America.”

The creation of this “phantom category obscure what was really going on and worth talking about”, Rushdie said, explaining that some so-called Commonwealth Writers had more in common with the ‘magical realism’ of Latin American authors than with other ex- British colonies.

But even if Commonwealth Literature does not exist, the Commonwealth itself certainly does. The (British) Commonwealth of Nations, to give it its original name, is an association of states comprising Britain and its former colonies, along with their dependencies.

The original grouping in 1931 and comprised Australia, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand who, while self-governing, pledged allegiance to the British Crown. The association was expanded and restructured in 1949, when participants agreed to drop both the ‘British’ and the concept of allegiance. Today the Commonwealth is a loose alliance of 53 countries, with a combined population of more than one billion.

‘Commonwealth Literature’ is thus used to cover the literary works from territories that were once part of the British Empire, but it usually excludes books from the United Kingdom unless these are produced by resident writers who originate from a former colony. The great irony, however, is that much of the best literature that has emerged from Britain in the last years has been produced by writers from or with roots in colonies.

    Gayatri Spivak and subaltern

Gayatri Spivak is prominent name in the world of literary criticism. She is heavily bended upon the other moments like Marxism, feminism and deconstruction. What she have done in criticism, are the things where we can find all these things in bit or more.

Term ‘subaltern’ is borrowed from Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. It signifies ‘the oppressed classes. Here Gayatri puts her argument that a subaltern cannot speak his mind. Because he is suppressed by the one who is colonising him. The thing gets worse with colonised woman. Here suppression comes from dual side. As colonisers, in general, does not want anyone to speak against themselves; that is the first part. And the social structure which is more generally patriarchal, does not allow her to speak. Because in patriarchal society, woman is assigned with lot many roles – as wife, daughter, mother, sister. It makes her identity depended upon any male person. So there chances become laser n laser where woman haves her own identity as an individual. She, in one or the other way, finds satisfaction of life in making his man happy. Such conditioning has taken place in her life from days of childhood. So, with passing time, it gets naturalisation.

There emerged a new way of looking towards history—from the angle of subaltern. Cause it is duty of an intellectual to make visible position of the marginalised. Thus Subaltern studies project was launched during 1982 in leadership of Ranjit Guha. It challenged all the freedom fighters moment which took place in India. According to this study, some elite class people like Gandhiji, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Javaharlal Nehru, Lokmany Tilak are the most celebrated freedom fighters whereas some of the tribal people who have sacrificed their lives have no place in history. So, this history has deconstructed the idea of all the freedom fighting movement.

Gayatri have given a perfect concept-map which speaks a lot –

Social Formation	Subaltern	Dominant Group	Ideology
Class	Working Classes	Capitalist bourgeois	Capitalism
Empire	Natives	Europeans	Colonialism
Patriarchy	Women	Men	Gender
Nation	Ethnic Group	Majority	Homogenization and nationalism

Thus she speaks up for all the classes where domestication takes place in one or the other way. And this happens in such a way that one feels helpless to do anything but to sacrifice. It becomes very much difficult to free the mind which once was colonised. There is a very interesting saying in English. –

“Once a victim, forever a victim”

    ‘Commonwealth literature does not exist’ – Salman Rushdie.

What does Commonwealth mean?

“Commonwealth,^[3][4] is an intergovernmental organisation of 52 member states that were mostly territories of the former British Empire.^[4] The Commonwealth operates by intergovernmental consensus of the member states, organised through the Commonwealth Secretariat, and non-governmental organisations, organised through the Commonwealth Foundation. English noun ‘Commonwealth’ in a sense means ‘public welfare, general good or advantage.”

-         Wikipedia.

Thus, commonwealth nation means the nations which were previously ruled by British raj. And now they have been established as free countries. As they were ruled for so many years, they perhaps may not have proper system to handle out everything. That is why there emerged ‘Commonwealth Foundation’ to give a helping hand to such nations.

‘Commonwealth Literature’

As a part of Commonwealth Foundation’s cultural programme, some group of international literary organizations came together. They helped commonwealth writers to develop their writing craft. They started giving some prise for such literatures. For example ‘short story prize’. This is how the term ‘Commonwealth Literature’ comes in existence.

Many of the writers have accepted and started using the term. They have begun to work as a commonwealth writer. While some writers denied to accept it. One of the prominent voices is of Salman Rushdie. He very strongly disagrees on the point that he questions even the existence of term- Commonwealth  Literature, in one of magazines. He very clearly considers it ‘unhelpful’ and even ‘distasteful’. It was an Interview where Rushdie have given these words. In the same interview, two contemporary writers were there. Shiva Naipaul and Buchi Emecheta. Rushdie found that they also think in the same direction. That is why; the interview got published under headline like this ‘Commonwealth writers . . . but don’t call them that’.

The Commonwealth Pen: An Introduction to the Literature of the British Commonwealth  By A. L. McLeod

English Postcoloniality: Literatures from around the World  By Radhika Mohanram; Gita RajanGreenwood Press, 1996

Towards a Transcultural Future: Literature and Society in a 'Post'-Colonial World By Geoffrey V. Davis; Peter H. Marsden; Bénédicte Ledent;

Class, Culture, and the Colonial Context: The Status of Women in Buchi Emecheta's the Joys of Motherhood By Derrickson, Teresa

Traveling with Joyce: Derek Walcott's Discrepant Cosmopolitan Modernism By Pollard, Charles W

These are some of the examples of commonwealth literature article. 



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Bhumi Dangi.

Department of English, MK Bhavnagar University

Semester-3 Assignment

Paper 10 - American Literature

Comparative studies:

William Wordsworth & Robert Frost (poets)

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William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 and died on 23 April 1850. He and his friend Coleridge almost worked together for the writings. Both of them together published ‘Lyrical Ballads’ and the new age begun. This is how; he becomes major figure in English Literature. The time in which the writers have lived is the time when a moment ‘French Revolution’ took place. We cannot say anything with certainty but after reading his poems, we see that he tried to escape something. He tried to hide himself from some kind of harsh, burning political issues. As the only poem “London” talks about several issues.

Let us see views of writer for poetry. He was perhaps first major writer who tells that “poetry should be in simple language.”

—      Poem-

 ‘Spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, recollected in tranquillity’

(Preface to the “Lyrical Ballads”)

He has given such definitions for poetry, poet, diction and language of poetry but he has broken the rules given by him only. As we can see that some of his poems are pregnant with layers of meanings which layman cannot understand.

‘TELL me, ye Zephrys! That unfold,

While fluttering o’er this gay Recess,

Pinions that fanned the teeming mould

Of Eden’s blissful wilderness,

Did only softly-stealing hours

There close the peaceful lives of Flowers?’

n “A Flower Garden At Coleorton Hall, Leicestershire”

‘The peace which other seek they find;

The heaviest storms not longer last;

Heaven grants even to the guiltiest mind’

n “The Forsaken”

As perhaps I have no right to expect from a Reader of an introduction to a volume of Poems that attentive perusal without which it is impossible, imperfectly as I have been compelled to express my meaning, that what I have said in the Preface should throughout be fully understood, I am the more anxious to give an exact notion of the sense in which I use the phrase poetic diction; and for this purpose I will here add a few words concerning the origin of the phraseology which I have condemned under that name.

The earliest Poets of all nations generally wrote from passion excited by real events; they wrote naturally, and as men: feeling powerfully as they did, their language was daring and figurative.

 In succeeding times, Poets, and men ambitious of the fame of Poets, perceiving the influence of such language, and desirous of producing the same effect, without having the same animating passion, set themselves to a mechanical adoption of those figures of speech, and made use of them, sometimes with propriety, but much more frequently applied them to feelings and ideas with which they had no natural connection whatsoever.

A language was thus insensibly produced, differing materially from the real language of men in any situation. The Reader or Hearer of this distorted language found himself in a perturbed and unusual state of mind: when affected by the genuine language of passion he had been in a perturbed and unusual state of mind also: in both cases he was willing that his common judgment and understanding should be laid asleep, and he had no instinctive and infallible perception of the true to make him reject the false; the one served as a passport for the other.

The agitation and confusion of mind were in both cases delightful, and no wonder if he confounded the one with the other, and believed them both to be produced by the same, or similar causes.

Besides, the Poet spoke to him in the character of a man to be looked up to, a man of genius and authority.

Thus, and from a variety of other causes, this distorted language was received with admiration; and Poets, it is probable, who had before contented themselves for the most part with misapplying only expressions which at first had been dictated by real passion, carried the abuse still further, and introduced phrases composed apparently in the spirit of the original figurative language of passion, yet altogether of their own invention, and distinguished by various degrees of wanton deviation from good sense and nature.

It is indeed true that the language of the earliest Poets was felt to differ materially from ordinary language, because it was the language of extraordinary occasions; but it was really spoken by men, language which the Poet himself had uttered when he had been affected by the events which he described, or which he had heard uttered by those around him.

ROBERT FROST

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, California, to journalist William Prescott Frost, Jr., and Isabelle Moodie.^[2] His mother was a Scottish immigrant, and his father descended from Nicholas Frost of Tiverton, Devon, England, who had sailed to New Hampshire in 1634 on the Wolfrana.

Frost's father was a teacher and later an editor of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin (which later merged with The San Francisco Examiner), and an unsuccessful candidate for city tax collector. After his death on May 5, 1885, the family moved across the country to Lawrence, Massachusetts, under the patronage of (Robert's grandfather) William Frost, Sr., who was an overseer at a New England mill. Frost graduated from Lawrence High School in 1892.^[4] Frost's mother joined the Swedenborgian church and had him baptized in it, but he left it as an adult.

Although known for his later association with rural life, Frost grew up in the city, and he published his first poem in his high school's magazine. He attended Dartmouth College for two months, long enough to be accepted into the Theta Delta Chi fraternity. Frost returned home to teach and to work at various jobs, including helping his mother teach her class of unruly boys, delivering newspapers, and working in a factory maintaining carbon arc lamps. He did not enjoy these jobs, feeling his true calling was poetry.

Adult years

In 1894 he sold his first poem, "My Butterfly. An Elegy" (published in the November 8, 1894, edition of the New York Independent) for $15 ($411 today). Proud of his accomplishment, he proposed marriage to Elinor Miriam White, but she demurred, wanting to finish college (at St. Lawrence University) before they married. Frost then went on an excursion to the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and asked Elinor again upon his return. Having graduated, she agreed, and they were married at Lawrence, Massachusetts on December 19, 1895.

Frost attended Harvard University from 1897 to 1899, but he left voluntarily due to illness.^[5][6][7] Shortly before his death, Frost's grandfather purchased a farm for Robert and Elinor in Derry, New Hampshire; Frost worked the farm for nine years while writing early in the mornings and producing many of the poems that would later become famous. Ultimately his farming proved unsuccessful and he returned to the field of education as an English teacher at New Hampshire's Pinkerton Academy from 1906 to 1911, then at the New Hampshire Normal School (nowPlymouth State University) in Plymouth, New Hampshire.

In 1912 Frost sailed with his family to Great Britain, settling first in Beaconsfield, a small town outside London. His first book of poetry, A Boy's Will, was published the next year. In England he made some important acquaintances, including Edward Thomas (a member of the group known as the Dymock poets and Frost's inspiration for "The Road Not Taken"^[8]), T. E. Hulme, and Ezra Pound. Although Pound would become the first American to write a favorable review of Frost's work, Frost later resented Pound's attempts to manipulate his American prosody. Frost met or befriended many contemporary poets in England, especially after his first two poetry volumes were published in London in 1913 (A Boy's Will) and 1914 (North of Boston).

In 1915, during World War I, Frost returned to America, where Holt's American edition of A Boy's Will had recently been published, and bought a farm in Franconia, New Hampshire, where he launched a career of writing, teaching, and lecturing. This family homestead served as the Frosts' summer home until 1938. It is maintained today as The Frost Place, a museum and poetry conference site. During the years 1916–20, 1923–24, and 1927–1938, Frost taught English at Amherst College in Massachusetts, notably encouraging his students to account for the myriad sounds and intonations of the spoken English language in their writing. He called his colloquial approach to language "the sound of sense.

In 1924, he won the first of four Pulitzer Prizes for the book New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes. He would win additional Pulitzers for Collected Poems in 1931, A Further Range in 1937, and A Witness Tree in 1943.^[10]

For forty-two years — from 1921 to 1963 — Frost spent almost every summer and fall teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English ofMiddlebury College, at its mountain campus at Ripton, Vermont. He is credited as a major influence upon the development of the school and its writing programs. The college now owns and maintains his former Ripton farmstead as a national historic site near the Bread Loaf campus. In 1921 Frost accepted a fellowship teaching post at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he resided until 1927 when he returned to teach at Amherst. While teaching at the University of Michigan, he was awarded a lifetime appointment at the University as a Fellow in Letters.^[11] The Robert Frost Ann Arbor home was purchased by The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan and relocated to the museum's Greenfield Village site for public tours.

In 1940 he bought a 5-acre (2.0 ha) plot in South Miami, Florida, naming it Pencil Pines; he spent his winters there for the rest of his life. His properties also included a houseon Brewster Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that today belongs to the National Historic Register.

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