Thinking Activity: The Only Story by Julian Barnes

 

👉 The Only Story 

The short novel is the life story of Paul Roberts, who we first meet as a 19-year-old Sussex University undergraduate returning to his parents' house in the leafy southern suburbs of London (Sutton, in Surrey, is suggested as a model.) The time is the early sixties, and there are a few references to current events. Paul joins the tennis club, which is the one of the few opportunities such places offer for socialising. In a random-draw mixed doubles, he is thrown together with Susan MacLeod, a 48-year-old married woman with two daughters older than Paul. Improbably, Paul and Susan become lovers and she eventually leaves her family to set up house with Paul in South London. Having nothing to do but a little housekeeping, Susan soon descends into alcoholism and dementia. Paul departs and embarks on foreign travels, picking up jobs and women at random.

Paul is a quintessentially alienated character. With no interest in either politics or religion, and no particular ambition, he takes life as it comes. As he narrates his life in this book, he freely admits that memory is unreliable and he may not be telling us the truth.

👉Paul Unreliable Narrator 

In this novel 'The Only story' Julian Barnes said that the Paul is unreliable narrator. Why she said this because Paul told everything based on memory and memory was not reliable. So we can't believe everything that told by Paul. Paul is very vested teller; he is telling a subjective truth he is arguing his case again,  with himself and with us. He is an unreliable narrator. Paul warns the readers early on , in a conversation aside:

You understand, I hope, that I’m telling 'you everything as I remember it? I never kept a diary, and most of the participants in my story – my story! my life! – are either dead or far dispersed. So I’m not necessarily putting it down in the order that it happened. I think there’s a different authenticity to memory, and not an inferior one. Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer'.(E.book p.20)

Later on he says: " I said never kept a diary. This isn't strictly true." So whatever Paul telling us is unreliable. 

👉Memory Novel - Structurally as well as thematically

In this novel, the idea of memory is dealt by Julian Barnes very interestingly.Memory prioritises when we retell the story as the story narrated in this novel The Only Story.It is said that

"History is collective memory; memory is personal history"

"Trauma is memory

When we look at the history of nation, history of society, history of human beings we may think that what is that and perhaps it is the memory of everybody.And that collective memory becomes history.Then what is memory? Memory is our personal history.It is a personal life that is lived in personal spaces.The life that is narrated or not narrated,told to anybody or not just told to self also or a history is only written for self and we do not share that with anybody else So it's is memory that is personal history which is not perhaps shared with anybody but it is only for us.When We are all alone we may going back to history our past and then we may be taking about that as a collectively.We go back into time and we write history that is what the forefathers the people on this earth in this society that time has lived and have done all this kind of things.

In form of literature we find that when there is one person (Paul Roberts) sitting there in his old age and going back into the past of his personal life and telling us the story of his life.That person will go back into memory that is only way that we can tell the story of the self.We will have to revisit our memory to tell others.So what is memory,how do we look at the memory? When anybody is revisiting the memory and trying to get historical evidence from his life and telling us the life story.Is it reliable or not? Can we say that well this is a true story because histories are normally considered as a true stories.Somebody individually tell a story is it reliable or not?.

We blindly do not rely on history.If there is the connection between history and memory it means that we also do not rely on memory.It may be our own personal memory.Through this novel Julian Barnes wants to prove that we have to be very careful of our memories.

While discussing this point in classroom sir has gave some others concerns to understand this novel.

👉Susan - madwoman in the attic

The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination is a 1979 book by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in which they examine Victorian literature from a feminist perspective. Gilbert and Gubar draw their title from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, in which Rochester's wife ( Bertha Mason) is kept secretly locked in an attic apartment by her husband. In their book, Gilbert and Gubar discuss the angel/monster trope in novels written by women, covering the works of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, and the Brontës. They claim that 19th-century female writers carried a lot of rage and frustration about the misogynistic world they lived in and the predominantly male literary tradition they tried to enter, and that this gender-specific frustration influenced these writers’ creative output. According to Gilbert and Gubar, their rage was often shown through the figure of the mad woman. They conclude by urging female writers to break out of this patriarchal dichotomy and not to let themselves be limited by its impositions.

The title of the book is derived from Jane Eyre‘s Bertha Mason, who is locked away by her husband Mr Rochester in the attic of Thornfield Hall. She is an ominous character, full of uncontrollable passion, violence, sensuality, and madness, almost bestial in her behaviour. We can compare the character of Bertha and Susan Macleod. Bertha was suffered by his husband and here Susan is suffering from some kind of this thing. She becomes an alcoholic. She speaks lies to Paul. Somewhere she is stuck with responsibility. She was beaten by his own husband. She had extramarital affair with Paul, she somewhere wants love, some kind of warmness but she was constantly become a victim of hatred, sexual pleasure and was beaten so many times.  Susan also become a victim of child abuse when she went to his uncle Hemph’s house. When finally she went with Paul there she feel lonely and that time she become alcoholic like anything. In the end, Paul also abandons her and her daughter Clara taking care of her.  Susan’s character is fascinating because there is another character who counterpointed Susan's character. 

Assignment Semester 4: Research Methodology

 

Write a detailed note on Plagiarism and Academic Integrity. 

Assignment Semester 4

Name : Pina Gondaliya 

Subject: Research and Methodology 

Roll No. : 18

Enrollment No. :  4069206420210001

Submitted To. : Department of English 

DEFINITION OF PLAGIARISM

Derived from the Latin word plagiarius ("kidnapper"), to plagiarize means "to commit literary theft" and to "present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source" (Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary [11th ed.; 2003; print]). Plagiarism involves two kinds of wrongs. Using another person's ideas, information, or expressions without acknowledging that person's work constitutes intellectual theft. Passing off another person's ideas, information, or expressions as your own to get a better grade or gain some other advantage constitutes fraud. Plagiarism is 

sometimes a moral and ethical offense rather than a legal one since some instances of plagiarism fall outside the scope of copyright infringement, a legal offense (see 2.7.4).

CONSEQUENCES OF PLAGIARISM

A complex society that depends on well-informed citizens strives to maintain high standards of quality and reliability for documents that are publicly circulated and used in government, business, industry, the professions, higher education, and the media. Because research has the power to affect opinions and actions, responsible writers compose their work with great care. They specify when they refer to another author's ideas, facts, and words, whether they want to agree. with, object to, or analyze the source. This kind of documentation not only recognizes the work writers do; it also tends to discourage the circulation of error, by inviting readers to determine for themselves whether a reference to another text presents a reasonable account of what that text says. Plagiarists undermine these important public values. Once detected, plagiarism in a work provokes skepticism and even outrage among readers, whose trust in the author has been broken. The charge of plagiarism is a serious one for all writers. Plagiarists are often seen as incompetent-incapable of developing and express ing their own thoughts-or, worse, dishonest, willing to deceive others for personal gain. When professional writers, such as journalists, are exposed as plagiarists, they are likely to lose their jobs, and they are certain to suffer public embarrassment and loss of prestige. Almost always, the course of a writer's career is permanently affected by a single act of plagiarism. The serious consequences of plagiarism reflect the value the public places on trustworthy information.Students exposed as plagiarists may suffer severe penalties, ranging from failure in the assignment or in the course to expulsion from school. This is because student plagiarism does considerable harm. For one thing, it damages teachers' relationships with students, turning teachers into detectives instead of mentors and fostering suspicion instead of trust. By undermining institutional standards for assigning grades and awarding degrees, student plagiarism also becomes a matter of significance to the public. When graduates' skills and knowledge fail to match their grades, an institution's reputation is damaged. For example, no one would choose to be treated by a physician who obtained a medical degree by fraud. Finally, students who plagiarize harm themselves. They lose an important opportunity to learn how to write a research paper. Knowing how to collect and analyze information and reshape it in essay form is essential to academic success. This knowledge is also required in a wide range of careers in law, journalism, engineering, public policy, teaching, business, government, and not-for-profit organizations.

Plagiarism betrays the personal element in writing as well. Discussing the history of copyright, Mark Rose notes the tie between our writing and our sense of self-a tie that, he believes, influenced the 

idea that a piece of writing could belong to the person who wrote it. Rose says that our sense of ownership of the words we write "is deeply rooted in our conception of ourselves as individuals with at least a modest grade of singularity, some degree of personality" (Authors and Owners: The 

Invention of Copyright [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993; print; 142]). Gaining skill as a writer opens the door to learning more about yourself and to developing a personal voice and approach in your writing. It is essential for all student writers to understand how to avoid committing plagiarism.

 INFORMATION SHARING TODAY

Innumerable documents on a host of subjects are posted on the Web apparently for the purpose of being shared. The availability of research. materials and the ease of transmitting, modifying, and using them have influenced the culture of the Internet, where the free exchange of information is an ideal. In this sea of materials, some students may question the need to acknowledge the authorship of individual documents. Professional writers, however, have no doubt about the matter. They recognize the importance of documentation whether they base their research on print or electronic publications. And so they continue to cite their sources and to mark the passages they quote.In the culture of the academy, too, the free exchange of information is a long-standing ideal. Under certain circumstances, this ideal. is described as academic freedom. But nothing about academic freedom or the free exchange of information implies ignoring authorship. Academic standards require all writers to acknowledge the authors whose work they use when preparing papers and other kinds of studies and reports.New technologies have made information easier to locate and obtain, but research projects only begin with identifying and collecting source material. The essential intellectual tasks of a research project has not changed. These tasks call for a student to understand the published facts, ideas, and insights about a subject and to integrate them with the student's own views on the topic. To achieve this goal, student writers must rigorously distinguish between what they borrow and what they create.As information sharing has become easier, so has plagiarism. For instance, on the Internet it is possible to buy and download completed research papers. Some students are misinformed about buying research papers, on the Internet or on campus. They believe that if they buy a paper, it belongs to them, and therefore they can use the ideas, facts, sentences, and paragraphs in it, free from any worry about plagiarism. Buying a paper, however, is the same as buying a book. or a magazine. You own the physical copy of the book or magazine, which you may keep in your bookcase, give to a friend, or sell. And you may use whatever you learn from reading it in your own writing. But you are never free from the obligation to let your readers know the source of the ideas, facts, words, or sentences you borrow. Publications are a special kind of property. You can own them physically, but the publisher or author retains rights to the content. You should also know that purchased papers are readily recognizable, and teachers can often trace downloaded materials through an Internet search.

UNINTENTIONAL PLAGIARISM

The purpose of a research paper is to synthesize previous research and scholarship with your ideas on the subject. Therefore, you should feel free to use other persons' words, facts, and thoughts in your research paper, but the material you borrow must not be presented as if it were your own creation. When you write your research paper, remember that you must document everything that you borrow-not only direct quotations and paraphrases but also information and ideas.Often plagiarism in student writing is unintentional, as when an elementary school pupil, assigned to do a report on a certain topic. copies down, word for word, everything on the subject in an encyclopedia. Unfortunately, some students continue to take this approach in high school and even in college, not realizing that it constitutes plagiarism. To guard against the possibility of unintentional plagiarism during research and writing, keep careful notes that always distinguish among three types of material: your ideas, your summaries and paraphrases of others' ideas and facts, and exact wording you copy from sources. Plagiarism sometimes happens because researchers do not keep precise records of their reading, and by the time they return to their notes, they have forgotten whether their summaries and paraphrases contain quoted material that is poorly marked or unmarked. Presenting an author's exact wording without marking it as a quotation is plagiarism, even if you cite the source. For this reason, recording only quotations is the most reliable method of notetaking in substantial research projects, especially for beginning students. It is the surest way, when you work with notes, to avoid unintentional plagiarism. Similar problems can occur in notes kept electronically. When you copy and paste passages, make sure that you add quotation marks around them. (See 1.7 for more on note-taking.) Another kind of unintentional plagiarism happens when students write research papers in a second language. In an effort to avoid grammatical errors, they may copy the structure of an author's sentences. When replicating grammatical patterns, they sometimes inadvertently plagiarize the author's ideas, information, words, and expressions.

SUMMING UP

You have plagiarized if you took notes that did not distinguish summary and paraphrase. from quotation and then you presented wording from the notes as if it were all your own.while browsing the Web, you copied text and pasted it into your paper without quotation marks or without citing the source. you repeated or paraphrased someone's wording without acknowledgment.

You took someone's unique or particularly apt phrase without acknowledgment. you paraphrased someone's argument or presented someone's line of thought without acknowledgment. you bought or otherwise acquired a research paper and handed in part or all of it as your own.You can avoid plagiarism by making a list of the writers and viewpoints you discovered in your research and using this list to double-check the presentation of material in your paper.

keeping the following three categories distinct in your notes: your ideas, your summaries of others' material, and exact wording you copy.identifying the sources of all material you borrow-exact wording, paraphrases, ideas, arguments, and facts. checking with your instructor when you are uncertain about your use of sources.

CITATION

MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers seventh Edition. The Modern Language Association of America, 2009.

Assignment Semester 4 : Contemporary Literature.

 

Assignment Semester 4

Name : Pina Gondaliya 

Subject: Contemporary Literature 

Roll No. : 18

Enrollment No. :  4069206420210001

Submitted To. : Department of English 

Postmodernism and Absurdist Critique of Julian Barnes The Only Story. 

Introduction : 

Barnes’s The Only Story (2018) is quite different from his previous fictional works as it depicts man's absurdity and experience of life's awful powers, like anguish, estrangement, breakup, alienation, and purposelessness skirting either on agnosticism or sustenance. It is inside this setting that Barnes delineates his characters as the people who, without 

any assistance, are confronting the brutal attacks of a meaningless life. Through this test practice, they try to cover what Camus portrayed as the unfamiliar opening to comprehend life as absurd. Barnes is completely mindful of the plight of men who are living in the contemporary society, lost to values, higher ideals, and even God, not discovering sustenance in time-worn convictions and customary feelings. Barnes's hero feels obliged to live on the individualistic plane. It is this felt sensation in living circumstances that at last outcomes into absurdity for him. He perceives this reality both inside and outside the marvelous world. He inventively and imaginatively depicts this capability in his The Only Story (2018), subsequently giving a predictable structure to the ill-defined realities of human presence in an absurd state of social disorder. 

The Only Story (2018) is a story of the protagonist Paul, who is only 19-years old, and he falls in love with Susan who is 48-year old. Both met with each other at the tennis club where they were assigned to be the partners in a doubles tennis tournament. Susan is married to Gordan, who is amusingly horrifying and drinks all the time and has two daughters. Paul and Susan begin an affair which remains till the completion of the first part of the novel. The second part of the novel starts with the fight between Paul and Susan on a trivial issue that becomes the harbinger of their breakup. Both Paul and Susan feel meaninglessness in their lives and their lives becomes absurd. In the third part of the novel, Paul starts living alone and contemplates over the meaning of love. He also tries to solve the riddle of what had happened with him and Susan and finally finds no great reason for their breakup.

Theoretical Framework 

The theoretical framework for the current study encompasses the idea of Postmodern Absurdism in literature. Despite the fact that its first appearance was seen back in 1875 which showed postmodernism as a method for depicting a style of painting, the term postmodernism is associated for the most part with the twentieth century, French Impressionism. As Grenz comments, it was first associated with painting, religion, society and later with engineering and verses. (Grenz,1996). The Hungarian critic Martin Esslin coined the term ' The Absurd' in his book The Theatre of Absurd 1961 (Esslin, 1961), which displays the spearheading and progressive works of well-known absurdist writers, like Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Arthur Adamov, Bertolt Brecht and Jean-Paul Sartre. Panda avows that these absurdist writers exhibit extraordinary types of craziness to the performance center through social changes and reactions to the human situation in the after-war society (Panda, 2016). Esslin defines the term in these words “absurdism in the field of music, the word ‘Absurd’ means ‘out of harmony’ and holds dictionary meanings such as incongruous, unreasonable, illogical, and ridiculous” (Esslin, 1961, p. 23). In Petty's views, "Absurdism, is one of the most exciting and creative movements in the Modern Age, as a term it is applied to a particular type of realistic work which has absorbed readers and critics for the past four-decade" (2012).

Thomas Nagel, in his essay The Absurd (1971), talks about the absurdity and discloses the fact that absurdism is a permanent or a temporary condition for which a man struggles without anyreason. 

According to him, man assumes that the thing that he wants to have is the best thing, and without that thing, his existence will be futile. He remains unable to see the already existing reality by foregrounding it with his absurd life. Nagel further argues that man's condition of absurdity is because of our attention to a trivial thing. He asserts that man's attention is usually drawn towards a subject that has no serious value and ultimately, man becomes overwhelmed by 

that subject by rejecting all the reality that exists within his circle. Furthermore, Nagel argues that whenever a man faces the situation of absurdity, he usually tries to get the existential idea by solving the problem due to which he has been facing the absurdity. He says that it is the aspiration that excites one's emotions of absurdity, and this aspiration of one thing makes the life of that person absurd as the man cannot look at the other things that are happening in his surroundings. Nagel asserts that "In ordinary life a situation is absurd when it includes a conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality” (1971, p. 4).

Analysis 

Barnes, in The Only Story (2018) investigates the person's awareness of being isolated from the entire mechanical assemblage of social rituals and ceremonies. He opens the text by uttering the following words: Most of us have only one story to tell. I don’t mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there’s only one that matters, only one finally worth telling, this is mine (Barnes, 2018, p. 13).Julian Barnes sees that self-distance is a major obstruction in the psychological development of a person which is more regrettable than social estrangement. The protagonist of the novel Paul, endeavors for his significance and reason for being loved forever. He is very peaceful for his nearby residents and neglects to give them any comfort. He finds himself when he approaches Susan in the tennis club and understands that separation lies in getting included. This also shows that Paul is a perfect symbol of absurdity as through his character, the writer is intentionally attempting to pass on to the comments on absurdity, which is overwhelming in the present society. The novel is absurd in its nature as it manages the hero's depression and feelings of anguish radiating from his irritation, breakup, meaninglessness, convention, and his actual self. As Paul asserts, "Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question" (Barnes, 2018, p. 13).

Nagel, in his essay The Absurd (1971), asserts that whenever a man feels that he is in an absurd situation, he actually tries to change it through different thinking patterns. He firstly goes for changing the thing due to which his aspirations are being demolished, then he looks at the next end that is the realistic manner of looking at the things, and finds that there exists the reality. He himself writes, "When a person finds himself in an absurd situation, he will usually attempt to change it, by modifying his aspirations (1971, p. 4). Barnes also examines absurdity by focusing on unhappiness and the struggle to adjust to ordinary activities, the futile attempt to escape life, and the struggle to change in conformity with an emotional culture. Barnes introduces characters in his work who have improved existentialist ideas that correlate with Absurdism. He anticipated the belief that solipsism is an innate power that affects some aspect of the human experience by saying that myself is the best self. He regards fatigue as a mental miracle in the majority of his stories, and his seemingly exhausted protagonists are treated as dynamic, multifaceted, and strengthening persons. Barnes believes that fatigue, which includes a state of heightened hesitance, holds the key to opportunity. Barnes says in his KenyonCollege address that the most important kind of opportunity is the ability to think about others and to sacrifice for them repeatedly. As Barnes speaks through Paul:The time, the place, the social milieu? I don't know how significant they are in anecdotes about affection. Maybe in the days of yore, in the works of art, where there are fights among affection and obligation, love and religion, love and family, love and the state (Barnes, 2018, p. 13).Barnes's novel offers the reader a storyteller who is both intriguing and amusing. His ability for the formation of period interferences additionally has no little influence in keeping the reader in thrall. The Only Storyhappens in the fifties, sixties, and seventies at the core of the Sexual Revolution when profound desire and enthusiastic delicacy was turned into the request for the day and ultimately led towards Absurdism of life (Steel, 2018). As Paul speaks for Susan: I was matched with Mrs.Susan Macleod, who was unmistakably not a Caroline. She was, I estimated, someplace in her forties, with her hair pulled back by a lace, uncovering her ears, which I neglected to see at the time (Barnes, 2018, p.16).Barnes gives a point by point record of the odd encounters of both of these upset hyper-Absurd characters. He centers around the different blends of mental issues, youth injury, money related conditions that unite them as bookkeepers under the office. Through portraying their current age and affection Barnes, communicates the fatigue, estrangement, and tumult which is present in the contemporary society. The Only Story (2018) sets that an uplifted awareness can be accomplished when fatigue is changed over to fixation. From the beginning, Paul is resolved to not winding up in the suburbs like "with a tennis spouse and two kids," but on the other hand, he is absolutely uninterested in easygoing sex. Susan at first encapsulates both defiance and profundity; however, in the middle of the novel she deals with their love in a very affectionate manner. In spite of the fact that the relationship brings the sting of social shame and much misfortune as well, the storyteller stays devoted to his development of the story. As Kirkus proclaims, "The Only Story is a somber but well-conceived character study suffused with themes of loss and self-delusion" (Kirkus, 2018).Nagel in his essay The Absurd (1971) talks about absurdity and asserts that the absurdity is like having no aim in life while man, through changing his mind, can change absurdity into existentialism. He further suggests that an individual faces absurdity on a temporary or permanent basis and tries to get out of his by fighting against it. In the Only Story, one can easily notice the Kierkegaard Ian theory that the individual is exclusively answerable for offering significance to their own lives and for carrying on with that life enthusiastically and truly, regardless of numerous Existential impediments and interruptions, including despair, tension, absurdity, alienation, and boredom. As Paul narrates, "My mother, of course, was never stuck for a phrase. As I said, I drove Mrs. Macleod home, and nothing happened. And again; and again" (Barnes, 2018, p. 18).

Positive self-evaluation is a crucial component of the ability to cope with absurd levels of anxiety and isolation. A positive mental self-perception is a sign of trust and establishes the conditions needed to face challenges and the unexpected future. People always construct absurdism as a basic principle to interpret their own reality, giving everything they encounter, relevance and significance. As Nagel writes "It would be different if we could not step back and reflect on the process but were merely led from impulse to impulse without self-consciousness” (Nagel, 1971, p.5). Man is fully aware of his inner and outer world, but he interprets both of the world in a way that no one except him can interpret that better than him. After getting experience of the inner and outer world, people construct their own phenomenological reality which remains dependent upon their own biased observation. The procedure of self-awareness is the name of this innovative procedure. Barnes also, through his novel, tries to do the same by making his protagonist character worthwhile. "I am sorry our acquaintance has been so brief, my dear" (2018. p. 47).

Nagel, while talking about absurdism, argues that "most people feel on occasion that life is absurd, and some feel it vividly and continually" (1971, p. 1). Social structures provide a sense of belonging and stability, as well as a mechanism to avoid confrontations with mortality and absurdity. It is like a person who works in a company that is nearing the end of its life expectancy. For the modern man, the consciousness of absurdism develops a sense of isolation and terror. In Barnes’s point of view, everything is destined to an end, and all endeavors planned for keeping up what is known and natural are insignificant. I guess I could do some genuine research –search for old postcards inthe central library, or chase out the not many photographs I have from that time, and retrofit my story as needs are. In any case, I'm recalling the past, not reconstructing it (Barnes, 

2018, p. 4).Nagel asserts “that absurdity results because what we take seriously is something small and insignificant and individual” (1971, p. 6). Individuals are constrained into a sphere of isolation and estrangement as they battle to discover a reason forever. In many cases, the ideas of detachment and alienation, as depicted by Postmodern Absurd, contrast from that of existentialists. While existentialists see estrangement as a natural, certain part of human presence, which blocks the person from discovering importance in an absurd life, preposterous pragmatists consider it to be the contention amongst the individual and social order world. For example, the existential idea of estrangement is underpinned by Kafka's The Metamorphosis (1996), which isn't though pragmatic but imaginative realm. Gregory's sense of alienation is triggered by forces beyond his control when he wakes up one morning and realizes he has turned into a bug. In this sense, his detachment is the result of his unusual transformation rather than the fact that he lives in a chaotic society. Barnes' characters in The Only Story (2018), for example, face a sense of isolation as a result of a daily reality that causes them to feel alienated. These characters grow apart, not because of their usual structure, but because of their struggle to adapt to a world ruled by viciousness and a frightening atmosphere. One of the characters, Paul, for example, battles to his stress on a regular basis because he is afraid of being judged by the general public.Conclusion In this article, absurdism as a postmodern hybridgenre has been critically analyzed by concentrating chiefly on the elaborative characteristics of 

absurdism like boredom, confusion, and meaninglessness. The current research acutely focuses upon the Nagel's idea, which considers absurd as an integral part of postmodernism. The novel The Only Story (2018) doesn't only nullify the basic characteristics of Postmodernism like representation of hyper-reality, the futility of life, and absurdism; rather it vividly highlights that almost all of the characters of the novel are facing absurdity in a way that is common to all of them. For instance, in The Only Story, components of perplexity, history, mainstream society, counterculture, love, separation, sex, and science are joined to make a satire of the social interference of the Postmodern Absurdity. In the whole of the novel, protagonist characters in specific and minor characters, in general, remain in a vicious circle of life which makes their lives full of absurdity. To cut the discussion short, it can be rightly said that it is the result of postmodern advancement that theprotagonist characters like Paul and Susan face absurdity in their lives. 

Citation 

Barnes, J. (2018). The Only Story. Random House: Penguin.

Camus, A. (2013). The Myth of Sisyphus. London: Penguin.

Esslin, M. (2015). The Theatre of the Absurd. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Foley, M. (2011). The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes It Hard to Be Happy. New York: Simon and Schuster, Ltd.

Gavins, J. (2012). “The Literary Absurd.” The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. Ed. Bray, Joe et al. Routledge: New York.

Grenz, S. (1996). A Primer on Postmodernism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Company.

Harris, C. (1971). Contemporary American Novelists of the Absurd. Connecticut: College and University Press.

Kafka, F. (1996). The Metamorphosis and Other Stories (S. Appelbaum, Trans.). Dover Publications.

Kierkegaard, S. (2011). The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes It Hard to Be Happy. New York: Simon and Schuster, Ltd.

Assignment Semester 4 : Comparative Literature and Translation Studies

 

Name : Pina Gondaliya 

Paper Name: Comparative Literature and Translation Studies. 

Topic: Fanonism and Constructive Violence in Petals of Blood 

Roll No. : 18

Enrollment No.: 4069206420210001

Submitted to:  Department of English Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Comparative Literature in India: An Overview of its History. 

By : Subha Chakraborty    

Introduction  : 

The essay gives an overview of the trajectory of Comparative Literature in India, focusing pri-marilyn on the department at Jadavpur University, where it began, and to some extent the department of Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies in the University of Delhi, where it later had a new beginning in its engagement with Indian literatures. The department at Jadavpur began with the legacy of Rabindranath Tagore’s speech on World Literature and with a modern poet-translator as its founder. While British legacies in the study of literature were evident in the early years, there were also subtle efforts towards a decolonizing process and an overall attempt to enhance and nurture creativity. Gradually Indian literature began to receive prominence along with literature from the Southern part of the globe. Paradigms of approaches in comparative literary studies also shifted from influence and analogy studies to cross-cultural literary relations, to the focus on reception and transformation. In the last few years Comparative Literature has taken on new perspectives, engaging with different areas of culture and knowledge, particularly those related to marginalized spaces, along with the focus on recovering new areas of non-hierarchical literary relations.

Table Content 

Key Points 

• Decolonizing process 

• Creativity 

• Cross-cultural literary relations 

• Interdisciplinary 

👉 The Beginning 

Long before the establishment of Comparative Literature as a discipline, there were texts focusing on comparative aspects of literature in India, both from the point of view of its relation with literatures from other parts of the world particularly Persian, Arabic and English and from the perspective of inter-Indian literary studies, the multilingual context facilitating a seamless journey from and between literatures written in different languages.

Buddhadeva Bose, one of the prime architects of modern Bengali poetry, did not fully subscribe to the idealist visions of Tagore, for he be-lived it was necessary to break away from Tagore to be a part of the times, of modernity, but he too directly quoted from Rabindranath’s talk on “visva sahitya” while writing about the discipline, interpreting it more in the context of establishing connections, of ‘knowing’ literatures of the world. Bose, also well-known for his translations of Baudelaire, Hoelderlin and Kalidasa, wrote in his preface to the translation of Les Fleurs du Mal that his intention in turning to French poetry was to move away from the literature of the British, the colonial masters, while in his introduction to the translation of Kalidasa’s Meghdutam.

Sudhindranath Dutta, also well-known for his translation of Mallarmé and his erudition both in the Indian and the Western context, to teach in the department of Comparative Literature. Of the first five students in the department, three became well-known poets and the fourth a fine critic of Bengali poetry. 

The first syllabus offered by the department in 1956 was quite challenging. There was a considerable section of Sanskrit literature along with Greek and Latin literature and then Bengali, its relation with Sanskrit literature and its general trajectory, and then a large section of European literature from the ancient to the modern period.

Indian Literature as a Comparative Literature 

It was actually in the seventies that new perspectives related to pedagogy began to enter the field of Comparative Literature in Jadavpur. In 1974, the department of Modern Indian Languages Started a post-MA course entitled “Comparative Indian Literature”. A national seminar on Comparative Literature was held in Delhi University organized by Nagendra, a writer-critic who taught in the Hindi department of Delhi University and a volume entitled Comparative Literature was published in 1977. However, it was only in 1994 that an MA course in Comparative Indian Literature began in the department. 

The task, comparatists realized was, as so aptly voiced by Aijaz Ahmad, to trace “the dialectic of unity and difference – through systematic periodization of multiple linguistic overlaps, and by grounding that dialectic in the history of material productions, ideological struggles, competing conceptions of class and community and gender, elite offensives and popular resistances, overlaps of cultural vocabular-ies and performative genres, and histories of orality and writing and print” (Ahmad 265). Dealing with Indian literature from a comparative perspective also meant looking at the interactions taking place with literatures in regions beyond the geo-political 

boundaries of the nation state. All this would necessarily take up a long period of time. The beginning of the process was seen in the comprehensive and integrative three-volume histories of Indian literature, where Indian literatures were studied not as discrete units but in dialogue with one another, brought out by Sisir Kumar Das, a faculty member at the department of Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies, with support from other members of the department and the Sahitya Akademi.

Centers of Comparative Literature Studies

During the seventies and the eighties Comparative Literature was also practiced at a number of centers and departments in the South of India such as in Trivandrum, Madurai Kamaraj University, Bharathidasan University, Kottayam and Pondicherry. Although often Comparative Literature courses were held along with English literature, a full-fledged Comparative Literary Studies department was established in the School of Tamil Studies in Madurai Kamaraj University. A reputed poet, author and critic, K. Ayappa Paniker, from Kerala, must also be mentioned while talking about the south for his work in the area, particularly that related to comparisons of literary theory, and for his book on the narrative traditions of India.3In Tamil, apart from studies related to the comparison of texts from two different cultures, Classical Tamil texts were compared with texts from the Greek, Latin and Japanese counterpart traditions. Later in the eighties and the nineties other Centres were established in different parts of the country, either as independent bodies or within a single language department as in Punjabi University, Patiala, Dibrugarh University, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University, Sambalpur University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai. In 1986 a new full-fledged department of Comparative Literature was established at Veer Narmad South Gujarat University, Surat, where focus was on Indian literatures in Western India. 

Centers of Comparative Literature Studies

Comparative Literature courses were held along with English literature, and a full-fledged Comparative Literary Studies department was established in the School of Tamil Studies in Madurai Kamaraj University. A reputed poet, author and critic, K. Ayappa Paniker, from Kerala, must also be mentioned while talking about the south for his work in the area, particularly that related to comparisons of literary theory, and for his book on the narrative traditions of India. In Tamil, apart from studies related to the comparison of texts from two different cultures, Classical Tamil texts were compared with texts from the Greek, Latin and Japanese counterpart traditions. Later in the eighties and the nineties other Centres were established in different parts of the country, either as independent bodies or within a single language department as in Punjabi University, Patiala, Dibrugarh University, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University, Sambalpur University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai. In 1986 a new full-fledged department of Comparative Literature was established at Veer Narmad South Gujarat University, Surat, where focus was on Indian literatures in Western India. Also in 1999 a department of Dravidian Comparative Literature and Philosophy was established in Dravidian University, Kuppam. 

Jadavpur called Indian Comparative Literature Association and the other in Delhi named Comparative Indian Literature Association. The two merged in 1992 and the Comparative Literature Association of India was formed, which today has more than a thousand members. In the early years of the Association, a large number of creative writers participated in its conferences along with academics and researchers, each enriching the horizon of vision of the other.

Reconfiguration of areas of comparison

The eighties again saw changes and reconfigurations of areas of comparison at Jadavpur University. In the last years of the seventies, along with Indian literatures, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude became a part of the syllabus with a few other texts from Latin American Literatures and then Literatures from African countries were included. An Area Studies component to study the literature of Pakistan has also been designed. As for the other Area Studies components, the department today hosts Centers for African, Latin American and Canadian studies where some research work and annual seminars are organized. A few, like the pres-ent author, are of the opinion that given the relatively small number of faculty in the department, the Area Studies programmes led to a division of the scarce resources and also diverted attention from some of the key challenges in comparative literature studies in India, namely, the systematic amalgamation of data related to the Indian context and its analysis from comparative perspectives, and also perhaps the mapping of intercultural relations with and among India’s neighboring countries. Components from the diverse Area Studies could possibly have been included as integrated parts of the main curriculum.

Reception Studies 

Right from the beginning of the discipline in India, cross-cultural relations between Indian literature and European and American literature had been in focus. There was again a shift during this period as the term “influence” began to be questioned by several scholars and particularly so in colonized countries where there was a tendency to look for influences even when they were non-existent.  In several articles as well, one on the reception of the novel in Bengal for instance, the receiver and not the emitter was in focus. This also implied that the receiver was taking elements from another culture in accordance with her own needs or the needs of the system, while the foreign elements underwent a transformation in accordance with forms, elements and ideologies in operation in the system at any given moment. So it was not a question of a dominating culture imposing its literature on another. Reception studies also pointed to historical realities determining conditions of acceptability and hence to complex configurations between literature and history. To give an instance, it seemed that romanticism of a particular kind had an easy access into the realm of Bengali literature, but it was a romanticism that did not accept many of the European elements. Burns and Wordsworth were very popular and it was felt that their romanticism was marked by an inner strength and serenity. 

Research direction 

The Department of Assamese in Dibrugarh University received the grant and published a number of books related to translations, collections of rare texts and documentation of folk forms. The department of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University also received assistance to pursue research in four major areas, East-West Literary Relations, Indian Literature, Translation Studies and Third World Literature. Incidentally, the department had in Manabendra Bandyopadhyay, an avid translator who translated texts from many so-called “third-world countries”. Conferences were held and research material published in all four areas. In the next phase support was given for publishing text-books in the area and for preparing an infrastructure for the study of Indian literature. This led to the publication of three texts on genres, themes and literary historiography in the Indian context. The department at Jadavpur University was upgraded under the programme to the status of Centre of Advanced Studies in 2005, and research in Comparative Literature took a completely new turn. The need to foreground the relevance of studying literature was becoming more and more urgent in the face of a society that was all in favor of technology and the sciences and with decision makers in the realm of funding for higher education turning away from the humanities in general. The task for departments of humanities and literature was to demonstrate that they were looking into and working with a knowledge system just as any other discipline, only literature’s ways of knowing were different. 

A project on the interface between Perso-Arabic and South Asian literatures was also planned and a number of lectures delivered in the area. Earlier, under a different grant, the tradition of Bhakti and Sufi were studied together and a volume was published. Visiting Professors were invited to give several lectures on Japanese and South Korean literature. A one-day colloquium on Kolkata’s Chinese connections was held in collaboration with the H.P. Biswas India-China Cultural Studies Centre of Jadavpur University and a seminar on framing intercultural studies between India and China was held with the Centre and the department of International Relations, Jadavpur University.

Interface with Translation Studies and Cultural Studies

Comparative Literature’s relationship with Translation Studies was not a new phenomenon for one or two departments or centers, such as the one in Hyderabad University, which was involved in doing translation studies for a considerable period. Today the university has a full-fledged Centre for Comparative Literature offering courses, and research in Translation Studies is an important area. Almost all departments or centers of Comparative Literature today have courses on Translation or Translation Studies. Both are seen as integral to the study of Comparative Literature. Translation Studies cover different areas of inter literary studies.As for Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature has always engaged with different aspects of Cultural Studies, the most prominent being literature and its relation with the different arts. Today studies in intermediality in Comparative Literature are common. But beyond such studies courses in Comparative Literature also offer modules on Comparative Cultural Studies where key texts in the global field are juxtaposed with related texts from the Indian context. The M Phil course on the subject at Jadavpur University highlights changing marginalities, ‘subcultures’ and movements in relation to contemporary nationalisms and globalization, and also sexualities, gender and the politics of identity

In some of the new centers of Comparative Literature that came up in the new universities es-tablished in the last Five Year Plan, diaspora studies were taken up as an important area of engagement. It must be mentioned though that despite tendencies towards greater interdisciplinary approaches, literature continues to occupy the central space in Comparative Literature and it is believed that intermedial studies may be integrated into the literary space.

Conclusion 

Non-hierarchical connectivity

 It is evident that Comparative Literature in the country today has multifaceted goals and visions in accordance with historical needs, both local and planetary. Several University departments today offer Comparative Literature separately at the M Phil level, while many others have courses in the discipline along with single literatures. As in the case of humanities and literary studies, the discipline too is engaged with issues that would lead to the enhancement of civilizational gestures, against forces that are divisive and that constantly reduce the potentials of human beings. In doing so it is engaged in discovering new links and lines of non-hierarchical connectivity, of what Kumkum Sangari in a recent article called “co-construction”, a process anchored in “subtle and complex histories of translation, circulation and extraction” (Sangari 50). And comparatists work with the knowledge that a lot remains to be done and that the task of the construction of literary histories, in terms of literary relations among neighboring regions, and of larger wholes, one of the primary tasks of Comparative Literature today has perhaps yet to begin. In all its endeavors, however, the primary aim of some of the early architects of the discipline to nurture and foster creativity continues as a subterranean force.

Citation 

• Ahmad, Aizaz. “Indian Literature.” Theory: Classes, Nations,       Literatures. London: Verso. 1992. 

       243-285. Print.

• Dasgupta, Subha Chakraborty. "Comparative Literature in India: An Overview of its History." Comparative Literature & World Literature Spring 2016.

• Datta, Satyendranath. “Samapti.” Satyendranath Kabyagrantha. Ed. Aloke Ray. Kolkata: Sahitya Samsad. 1984. Print.

• R. Radhakrishnan. “Why compare?” New Literary History 40.3, Summer (2009): 453-71. Print.

• Sangari, Kumkum. “Aesthetics of Circulation: Thinking Between Regions.” Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature XLVX (2013-14):9-38. Print.

• Tagore, Rabindranath. “Visva Sahitya.” Rabindra-Rachanabali Vol. 10. Kolkata: WBSG 1987. 324-333. Print.