Assignment :-2

Name : Asari Bhavyang .M 

Roll no :-3

Enrollment No:-3069206420200002

Course:-M.A (English)Sem3

Subject:-Indian English Literature – Post-Independence

Topic:-Write an essay on narrative technique in Midnight’s Children.

Teacher Name:- Dilip Barad sir 

Batch :- 2021-2023

Email:- asaribhavyang7874@gmail.com

Department:- Department of English

Salman Rushdie Full Name is Ahmed Salman Rushdie. He was Known For his Novelist, essayist, etc...He was Born at June 19, 1947 in Bombay, India which is now known as Mumbai. He has done his Education in  King's College, University of Cambridge. His  Selected Works  Midnight’s Children was published at 1981 The Satanic Verses , Haroun and the Sea of Stories .He has also got  Booker Prize for Fiction ,James Joyce Award. His work a unique ability to cut through the cultural noise, but has also brought danger and controversy. Rushdie has published both adult and children’s fiction to universal . Salman Rushdie is a British-Indian writer whose allegorical novels combine magical realism and Indian culture to explore history, politics, and religious themes.

Midnight’s Children begins as narrator Saleem Sinai tells the story of his life. He talks about the children who are Born at the exact moment of India’s independence from British rule.  Saleem’s entire body is cracking under the stress  and he is slowly dying, into  six hundred and thirty million particles of dust.  Saleem must work fast if he is to tell his story before he dies, and he begins with his Kashmiri grandfather, Aadam Aziz who has just returned to Kashmir from medical school in Germany, and   One morning, while kneeling to pray, Aadam strikes his nose on the ground, and three small drops of blood escape from his nose. From that moment, he vows “never again to bow to any man or god. Over several years and many illnesses, Aadam and Naseem fall in love and are finally married, and the two prepare to move to Agra for Aadam’s new university job. In Agra, Aadam and Naseem are witnesses to  the violence of the British military, and in the aftermath of a massacre, Aadam befriends the Hummingbird, a Pro-Indian Muslim politician who inspires optimism throughout Agra. Aadam also meets Nadir Khan, the Hummingbird’s private secretary, and after the Hummingbird is murdered by assassins, Nadir takes refuge under Aadam’s floorboards, much to the dismay of his wife Naseem, known in her marriage as Reverend Mother. While living under the floor, Nadir falls in love with Aadam’s daughter, Mumtaz, and the two are married, spending three blissful years together underground. Ultimately, it is discovered that Nadir is impotent, and he is forced to divorce Mumtaz, who is left heartbroken. Mumtaz soon remarries Ahmed Sinai, who changes her name to Amina, and the two move to Bombay after she becomes pregnant.

Ahmed and Amina buy a mansion from William Methwold, a British colonist who is preparing to return to London after India’s independence, and they quickly move in, living amongst the Englishman’s belongings and customs. Growing increasingly pregnant, Amina goes into labor on the eve of India’s independence, along with another pregnant woman from Methwold’s Estate named Vanita, the wife of a poor accordionist who entertains the residents on the estate. Both women give birth at the stroke of midnight; however, Vanita dies shortly after, leaving her infant son, Shiva. Alone with the two children of midnight, a midwife named Mary Pereira switches the nametags of the children, effectively replacing rich with poor, in her own “private act of revolution.” In the days following, Mary’s guilt is so severe that she offers her services to Amina Sinai as an ayah to care for her infant Saleem, and she readily accepts. Mary returns to Methwold’s Estate with the Sinais, where she continues to keep her secret for several years before finally blurting it out, a victim of her own guilt.

The voices in Saleem’s head are the voices of the other children born during the midnight hour of independence, the “metaphorical mirror of a nation,” who each also happen to be endowed with different magical powers. Saleem attempts to organize the children, creating a forum for them in his mind, but their prejudices get the better of them, and they are unable to band together. Ultimately, it is Shiva who succeeds in dividing the children, and Saleem is left helpless.

Saleem continues to grow and moves with his family to Pakistan. As civil unrest brews leading up to the Indo-Pakistani War, he is again left helpless as bombs from an air-strike kill his family. In the chaos of the bombing, Saleem is hit in the head by an airborne spittoon, causing him to forget his name and identity. Saleem is soon drafted into the Pakistani army and he witnesses unspeakable events, finally running away into the jungle to avoid further violence. When he emerges from the jungle, the war is ending, India is victorious, and Saleem is still not sure who he is. During a celebratory parade, he runs into Parvati-the-witch, a fellow child of midnight who immediately recognizes Saleem. The two fall in love, and when Saleem is unable to father her children, Parvati puts a spell on Shiva, and he soon impregnates her. He quickly loses interest, and Parvati is free to marry Saleem, who has agreed to father her unborn child.

As Parvati goes into labor, civil unrest in India continues and Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minster, declares a state of emergency. Parvati finally gives birth to a son but, sadly, she is killed. At the same time, Saleem is kidnapped by Shiva and dragged in a van, where he is taken, along with the other children of midnight, and forcibly sterilized during Mrs. Gandhi’s sterilization program. Finally, Indira Gandhi’s Emergency ends, and Saleem and the other children of midnight are released from their imprisonment. Saleem soon finds his son and he moves back to Bombay, where he discovers that Mary Pereira is the owner of a local pickle factory. As Saleem finishes the telling of his story, he decides to begin telling his future, and he starts with his wedding to Padma, his companion and audience for the telling of his story. Padma and Saleem are to be married in Kashmir; however, before they are, Saleem finally succumbs to the cracks in his skin, and he crumbles into six hundred million pieces of dust.

Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children, pioneers a new wave of Indian English novels and he deliberately goes against the previously dominant Forsterian literary discourse. In an interview with BBC, Rushdie recounted that when reading such novels as E.M. Forster’s A Passage To India, he was struck by the realisation that this was not the India that he was familiar with. Rushdie told BBC that India wasn’t “cool and classicist”, it was “noisy and sensual”. The NY times reported that in Midnight’s Children, “the literary map of India is about to be redrawn”. Rushdie believes that India should be portrayed in the entirety of its multifaceted reality, not dimming the lights on the British and westernised elements of India, but also not merely writing about “village life and social ills”. Rushdie’s novel is of paramount importance in the post-colonial Indian discourse, due to its ability to truly represent the plurality and diversity of Indian culture in its entirety, pioneering a new wave of Indian English novels.

Midnight’s Children is an exploration of India’s post-colonial national identity, after ‘Partition’, the division of British India into two separate states, India and Pakistan in 1947 and the resulting cultural fragmentation and chaos that caused events such as the language riots in Bombay between the Gujarat and Marathi speaking people in 1956. However, to understand the concept of national identity, the concept of ‘nation’ itself must first be explored. Many philosophers and scholars have attempted to assign a definition to this often elusive concept. Benedict Anderson, a renowned Irish political scientist and historian, defined the nation as “an imagined political community” and the philosopher, Michel Foucault, defined ‘nation’ as a “discursive formation”. Rushdie introduces his own concept of nation that is specifically applicable to the post-colonial situation of India, saying that “the nature of Indian tradition has always been multiplicity and plurality and mingling… the idea of a pure culture is something which in India is, let’s say, even politically important to resist”. Rushdie reveals that the Indian nation is a diverse discourse that exists in many different fashions and that is defined by its diversity. Rushdie recognises that no singular definition can be placed on such a vast concept and that ‘nation’ is not a term waiting for a proper definition, but it is the combination of the variegated cultural influences from across the broad Indian social landscape, that form a nation that is united through its chaos. Saleem states that “To understand just one life you have to swallow the world … do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?”. This macrocosmic metaphor emphasises Rushdie’s portrayal of the nation as multiplicitious and dense, something that cannot be constrained to a singular definition. Instead of limiting the discourse of ‘nation’ to a singular reality, Rushdie explores the concepts of nation and national identity in post-colonial India, symbolically through the character of Saleem Sinai.

Rushdie presents Saleem’s life as an allegory for India’s post-colonial experience after Independence and the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Saleem laments that “thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks, I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history”. Saleem receives a letter, the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, who writes “you are the newest bearer of that ancient face of India which is also eternally young” and this metaphor instantly links Saleem with the nation of India. Rushdie’s choice to explore the story of India’s post-colonial history symbolically, using Saleem, not only creates a more personal recount that inspires extraordinary empathy from his audience, but “the symbol creates the illusion that we have grasped an undefined term”. Rushdie succeeds in grounding in reality, an idea of nation that seemingly defies traditional rationality and this symbol allows him to exhibit India in the way that it deserves, in the full splendor of the multiplicity of humanity that it possesses.

Rushdie uses Saleem to unite the main three conflicting religious presences in India harmoniously under one roof, illustrating once again that “Midnight’s Children is a novel about the enabling power of hybridity”. Saleem’s birth mother is a Hindu woman who had an affair with his father, a British Christian named Methwold, an allusion to William Methwold, a British coloniser. However, Mary Pereira, a nurse, puts “on the ankle of a ten-chip whopper with eyes… as blue as Methwold’s… this name: Sinai”. Therein, Saleem is given by fate to Muslim parents and raised as their son, the nurse being the only person aware of these events. Rushdie utilises this literary cliché of a ‘changeling’ to present Saleem as the unification of India’s main religious sects, continuing the theme of Saleem as a symbol for the whole of the nation. In addition to the views of the Prime Minister referred to above, further on in the novel, Saleem’s half-mad geography teacher, Mr. Zagallo, embarrasses Saleem in front of the class by criticising his facial features, comparing them to a map of India: “‘Thees stains’ he cries, ‘are Pakistan! Thees birthmark on the right ear is the East Wing; these horrible stained cheek, the West!’”. Through this imagery, Rushdie successfully uses the character of Saleem to unite not only the religious elements of India, but the geographically disparate cultures too, including that of India and Pakistan. It is true that “we can regard the body allegory as the ‘official’ allegory of the nation” and Rushdie’s sophisticated use of symbolism serves to portray the vast multiplicity of Indian society, but also to reveal that despite cultural variegation, India’s unique identity as a nation lies in its hybridity.

Rushdie further develops his use of symbols to explore the unique national identity of India that defies restrictive and singular definitions, through his introduction of the Midnight’s Children Conference and use of magic realism. Saleem recounts that “Midnight has many children; the offspring of Independence” and these 1001 children who were born at midnight were all gifted with unique and supernatural powers. Rushdie uses this magic realism and the allusion to the 1001 Arabian Nights, to link the midnight’s children with the ancient and superstitious Indian culture, but the time of their birth makes them children of the new India. Rushdie once again cleverly uses symbolism to unite the ‘old’ and ‘new’ India in the midnight’s children. Furthermore, the midnight’s children also “represented the variegated religions and culture prevalent in India.” Saleem describes them as a “many headed monster, speaking in myriad tongues of Babel”, but his gift of telepathy brings all these children together in a ‘conference’ of his mind, furthering the symbol of Saleem as the uniting force of India. However, this metaphor also has a dark side, as the disintegration of the so called “Midnight’s Children Conference”, represents the decline of India and the struggles it faced as a fledgling nation. This is most obvious when, after one year of existence, Saleem’s ‘imagined community’ “finally fell apart on the day the Chinese armies came down over the Himalayas to humiliate the Indian fauj”. Rushdie also again links fantasy with reality, when Saleem recounts the events of the mass sterilisation of the 581 Midnight’s Children who had survived up until that moment. This is a direct link to the 1975 ‘Emergency’ of India, initiated by Indira Ghandi, in which ‘sterilisation camps’ were present. Rushdie uses the Midnight’s Children to explore history in a very postmodern way, that is fragmented and plural, but completely unrepressed. Saleem describes the nation of India as a “miracle” and Rushdie certainly supports this statement, representing the nation symbolically as a “transcendental entity”, constantly adding multiple layers of meaning throughout the novel, to express the idea that whilst India is the very essence of multiplicity, it is a unique and wondrous formation, which is precisely what defines it as a nation.

Rushdie’s extensive use of magic realism can also be seen as a method of exploring the “sweep and chaos of contemporary reality and its resemblance to a dream or nightmare”. Rushdie uses this magic realism as a way of writing against traditional Western singular realities and instead writes “beyond the confines of the established and political social structures”. It is the magic realist form of the narrative, specifically regarding the gifts of the midnight’s children, that allows Rushdie to smuggle Saleem into every important political event of India’s first 30 years of independence, including the language riots in 1952, where Saleem claims he gave the “language marchers their battle-cry”. Rushdie’s extensive use of magic realism allows the characters to be transformed into symbols and metaphors and for their stories to be interpreted on many different levels. For example, an independence movement leader before Saleem’s birth, Mian Abdullah, is assassinated, although the novel recounts that “His body was hard and the long curved blades had trouble killing him”. Abdullah’s physical toughness defies reality and this allows it to be interpreted on a symbolic level, representing the difficulty of the British in suppressing the culture of an entire nation. Another example of Rushdie’s magic realism is the “fountains of confusion” released by a supposed “supernatural invasion” where “the past of India rose up to confound her present; the newborn secular state was being given an awesome reminder of it’s fabulous antiquity”. This example also serves to illustrate the confusion surrounding national identity and the conflict between the religions of Hinduism and Islam that dominated the society. Through magic realism, Rushdie expresses a “genuinely ‘third-world’ consciousness” to contrast the dominant Western discourse and to provide possible alternative hermeneutics of history, challenging the hegemonic power structures of British Imperialism.

Rushdie’s post-colonial exploration of national identity can be further seen in his use of language to repair power imbalances between the colonisers and the colonised. Language becomes one of the central issues in post-colonial studies, because colonisers use repression of traditional language and the imposition of their own language, to perpetuate and assert their own definitions of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’. Ever since the 17th century in India, “it has been impossible to deny that there was one language for the powerful and another for the powerless”. However, Rushdie approaches English in a new way, reforming the colonisers’ language as an act of resistance against the hegemonic discourse of British imperialism, redesigning a colonial language to reflect India’s post-colonial experience. Rushdie’s unique use of language “helps to establish a wider ethnocentric base for the English language creating an Indian blend of English”. Rushdie himself does not believe however, that English is, or should become, an alien language in India, instead pointing out that English has become an ‘Indian’ language and that the Indian-English is not the same as western English. Rushdie claims that “language, like much else in the newly independent societies, needs to be decolonized”, and his own unique language “can only be described as ‘Rushdiesque’”.

Rushdie believes that the multiplicity and mixed traditions of India are what give it its unique identity as a nation and instead of completely rejecting the Western influences brought to India by centuries of colonial occupation, he believes that these influences have in many cases, been reimagined and have become uniquely Indian. Rushdie’s unique language, his use of magic realism and the allegorical characters of Saleem and the midnight’s children, reveal that in post-colonial India, it is precisely the multiplicity and fragmentation of Indian society and culture that defines the unique national identity of this fledgling nation. 

Assignment : 1

Name : Asari Bhavyang .M 

Roll no :-3

Enrollment No:-3069206420200002

Course:-M.A (English)Sem2

Subject:-Indian English Literature – Pre-Independence

Topic:-Write a critical note on The Home and The World ?

Teacher Name:- Dilip Barad sir 

Batch :- 2021-2023

Email:- asaribhavyang7874@gmail.com

Department:- Department of English

Rabindranath Tagore:-

 Rabindranath Tagore was born on 7 May 1861 and died on 7 August 1941. He was a poet and writer. He was Bengali and we can see most of his work published in the Bengali language. Then he started writing in the English Language. He also won the Nobel Prize in Literature. He has work in Drama, Short Stories, Novel, and Poetry, Etc..... 

The Home and The World: Rabindranath Tagore:-

The Home And The World is the love triangle being portrayed would be fascinating in any context. By framing the happenings between Nikhil, Bimala, and Sandip with the background of the Swadeshi movement, the story takes on a new identity. simply woman questioning her marriage and role in society. Bimala's struggle is a reflection of Bengal's struggle.

This connection is not hidden behind complicated language, it's basically laid out for the reader. With Sandip's affirmation that Bimala is just the kind of symbol that the Swadeshi movement needs he is not just saying that Bimala and the movement are a good fit for each other he is saying that they are one and the same. Bimala is torn between two men. As the push to remove British goods from Bengal intensifies, Bimala's distance from Nikhil increases. This creates concurrent narratives that both run parallel to each other and occasionally interact in significant ways. A society's struggle for autonomy and a conflicted woman's soul searching share the stage together, with Sandip often playing the role of the puppeteer. It turns a love triangle into something much more significant.

The Home And The World toys with storytelling structure while still maintaining a fairly intimate narrative. Certainly the Bimala, Nikhil, and Sandip dynamic is what's at the forefront of the action, but the Swadeshi movement plays an equally important role and its connections to Bimala's own struggle are not to be underestimated.

Although the story focuses on the dynamic of a marriage—which shifts when a shadowy outsider enters the lives of the couple—much of the novel reads like a philosophical treatise. There are shifting viewpoints between the characters Bimala, Nikhil, and Sandip, and much of the book comprises their internal and external dialogues as they consider serious issues such as tradition, the roles of men and women in Indian culture, the nature of political change, the occasional need for violence in political activism, and other rhetorical exercises such as the weighing of the public good.

As the novel begins, Bimala is happy with her life. She has married a good, kind man who is educated and generous. She is content to worship him and accept his support in all things. What she does not feel, however, is excitement. When the political firebrand Sandip begins making speeches in their village, she is infatuated by his words, but also stirred by some of his political ideas. She thinks of him constantly. Sandip, who is only interested in pursuing his own desires and climbing the social strata, does nothing to discourage her interest in him.

Her husband, Nikhil, sees what is happening, but is unwilling to intervene. Nikhil believes that, if one is committed to living morally and thoughtfully, one can accept whatever arises. He is sad that he feels like a burden to Bimala, but is determined to let her make her own choices.

Bimala’s choices lead her to steal from Nikhil to raise money for Sandip’s cause, money that he keeps for himself. Overcome with shame at how she has allowed a man who now disgusts her to cause such havoc in her life, Bimala must try to save her marriage, support her country, and recommit herself to living by her conscience, not her passions. As village unrest turns to outbursts of violence, the characters are all changed by the decisions they must make.

Published in 1916, The Home and the World is a critically celebrated work with themes that its author knows intimately. The novel is a striking example of the power of art to edify or destroy causes, relationships, and possibly an entire country.

 The Home and the World is first-person Narrators. The narrators are only able to access their own thoughts and feelings. While narrators are able to report all events and conversations that they witness but they are unable to convey the thoughts and emotions of the other characters in the novel. This style of narration is important to the plot of the story. In this novel dialogue is equal. A good portion of the narrative is to the interaction between the characters while they remain focused on describing events and each narrator's personal reflections.

 It is difficult to decide the correct title for a novel.  One can assume the title is a comparison,  contrast between the society of one’s own, and the one outside, a theme that carries throughout the book, through the characterization of two of the male protagonists, symbolic in several ways.

The narration begins with Bimala, in a first-person manner, and then the three characters as the story progresses. The first-person narrative magnifies the impact of a character on the reader, that is, people generally familiarize themselves with the character in the first person, and can relate better to it. This particular feature in writing has been capitalized on greatly by  Tagore The character’s development eventually leads the reader to be engrossed in the story, with different narratives highlighting the differences in the basic thought process of the three main characters of the story. The plot is simple. The two characters, Nikhil and Sandip, share a common love interest, Bimala. Married to Nikhil, Bimala is a simple, familial person, whose entire life revolves around Home, her husband Nikhil, and her household responsibilities. Nikhil is a simple person.  hardworking, he is successful in his business, being the owner of several estates. He holds no biases against anyone and he respects and honors people from all societal strata. Sandip is probably the best-developed character in the novel.  he could be taken to be the actual opposite of what Nikhil’s personality is like. He believes that the means to achieve something may be immoral and deceitful as long as they justify the outcome. 

The story develops slowly and steadily through dialogue between the characters, and Tagore has punctuated the narrative with philosophical sub currents, which are immensely thought-provoking. You will see throughout the plot, pause and reflect on Tagore’s writing.

The philosophical debates between Sandip and Nikhil on the variety of issues range.  Bimala’s stance on her confusion between the two is also admirable. She in some arguments sides with Sandip, because of his radical, more progressive attitude towards every issue, and accuses Nikhil and the national affairs and the state of the nation seem more important to her than her marriage, and her life. Her mind changes when she sees Nikhil as her lover, as her caring husband.

The novel is having an interesting love triangle. It  Interspersed with allegorical references, intelligent metaphors, beautiful imagery, the narrative would appeal to anyone with a heart for logic. The arguments in the narrative are beautifully written.

The character development is something that would validate Tagore’s writing skills. The three primary characters are so different. Apart from this intricate love relationship between the three, the novel also brings out the national situation at the time, through Nikhil’s character. Tagore brings out the Nationalist movement, with several incidents in the story, which highlight the injustice to the common man. Communal violence, oppression by the rich, refusal of foreign goods, and the intermingling of religion and politics are some of the other issues Tagore has conveyed intelligently through this character.

As I mentioned before, the title of the book forms the essence and is visible throughout. The contrast between the ideologies of Nikhil and Sandip forms the spine of the book – and how Bimala is caught queerly in their midst. She does, however, return to ‘Home’ in the end, after she realizes how Nikhil is the one who truly loves her, and just wants to see her happy, even if he would have to let her go if that is what it would take.

 The language, the characterization, and the narrative are things one would enjoy. The book might not be a thriller, but it is definitely something that would get you thinking.

The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore is an Indian politics in the early twentieth century. As a means of encouraging his wife, Bimala, to emerge into the outer world, Nikhil introduces her to Sandip, an active leader in the Swadeshi movement. Bimala soon becomes the revolutionary fervor of Swadeshi and finds herself torn between the duties of home and the world. The Home and the World is a tragic example of the conflict between realism and idealism.

Though Nikhil and Bimala enjoy a  marriage, Nikhil wants her to enter the outer world, believing their love is true only if they recognize one another in the outer world. When Bimala attends a Swadeshi rally led by Sandip Babu, she insists he visit Nikhil's estate. Bimala and Sandip are attracted to one another, so Sandip decides to make his headquarters at the estate.

Bimala was connected with the Swadeshi movement because of her desire to work with Sandip. Sandip is obviously interested in Bimala, and she begins to question her marriage to Nikhil because Sandip represents everything she wants in a man. At Sandip's request, Bimala steals 6000 rupees from Nikhil's safe for the Cause, but Sandip's behavior makes her feel torn as though she is two people, one who is appalled by Sandip and one who is attracted to him.

Though Nikhil is distraught at losing Bimala, he grants her the freedom to choose her own life. Guilt-ridden about her theft, Bimala sends Amulya, a young disciple of Sandip's, to sell her jewels so she can replace the 6000 rupees, but instead, Amulya steals the money from Nikhil's treasury. Nikhil forgives Bimala's deceit, causing her to realize her husband is the one who truly loves her. When there is a Swadeshi riot in Bengal, Sandip flees the city while Nikhil goes into town to try to calm matters. Nikhil is shot in the head, and Amulya is killed by a bullet through his heart.

Jane Eyre with Wide Sargasso Sea and the character of Jane with Antoinette by applying Feminism and postcolonialism.

  Wide Sargasso Sea, her last novel, was published, Jean Rhys (24 August 1890 – 14 May 1979) was described in The New York Times as the greatest living novelist. Such praise is overstated, but Rhys’s fiction, long overlooked by academic critics, is undergoing a revival spurred by feminist studies. Rhys played a noteworthy role in the French Left Bank literary scene in the 1920’s, and between 1927 and 1939, she published four substantial novels and a number of jewel-like short stories. Although she owes her current reputation in large measure to the rising interest in female writers and feminist themes, her work belongs more properly with the masters of literary impressionism: Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce. She began to publish her writing under the encouragement of her intimate friend Ford Madox Ford, and she continued to write in spite of falling out of favor with his circle. As prizes and honors came to her in her old age after the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea, it must have given her grim satisfaction to realize that she had attained entirely by her own efforts a position as a writer at least equal to that of her erstwhile friends.

Jean Rhys’s first novel, Quartet, reflects closely her misadventures with Ford Madox Ford. The heroine, Marya Zelli, whose husband is in prison, moves in with the rich and respectable Hugh and Lois Heidler. Hugh becomes Marya’s lover, while Lois punishes her with petty cruelties. The central figure is a woman alone, penniless, exploited, and an outsider. In her next novel, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, the central figure, Julia Martin, breaks off with her rich lover, Mr. Mackenzie, and finds herself financially desperate. Voyage in the Dark tells the story of Anna Morgan, who arrives in England from the West Indies as an innocent young girl, has her first affair as a chorus girl, and descends through a series of shorter and shorter affairs to working for a masseuse. In Good Morning, Midnight, the alcoholic Sasha Jensen, penniless in Paris, remembers episodes from her past which have brought her to this sorry pass. All four of these novels show a female character subject to financial, sexual, and social domination by men and “respectable” society. In all cases, the heroine is passive, but “sentimental.” The reader is interested in her feelings, rather than in her ideas and accomplishments. She is alienated economically from any opportunity to do meaningful and justly rewarding work. She is an alien socially, either from a foreign and despised colonial culture or from a marginally respectable social background. She is literally an alien or foreigner in Paris and London, which are cities of dreadful night for her. What the characters fear most is the final crushing alienation from their true identities, the reduction to some model or type imagined by a foreign man. They all face the choice of becoming someone’s gamine, garçonne, or femme fatale, or of starving to death, and they all struggle against this loss of personal identity. After a silence of more than twenty years, Rhys returned to these same concerns in her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea. While the four early novels are to a large degree autobiographical, Wide Sargasso Sea has a more literary origin, although it, too, reflects details from the author’s personal life.

Wide Sargasso Sea :-

Wide Sargasso Sea requires a familiarity with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). In Brontë’s novel, Jane is prevented from marrying Rochester by the presence of a madwoman in the attic, his insane West Indian wife who finally perishes in the fire which she sets, burning Rochester’s house and blinding him, but clearing the way for Jane to wed him. The madwoman in Jane Eyre is depicted entirely from the exterior. It is natural that the mad West Indian wife, when seen only through the eyes of her English rival and of Rochester, appears completely hideous and depraved. Indeed, when Jane first sees the madwoman in chapter 16 of the novel, she cannot tell whether it is a beast or a human being groveling on all fours. Like a hyena with bloated features, the madwoman attacks Rochester in this episode.

Wide Sargasso Sea is a sympathetic account of the life of Rochester’s mad wife, ranging from her childhood in the West Indies, her Creole and Catholic background, and her courtship and married years with the deceitful Rochester, to her final descent into madness and captivity in England. Clearly, the predicament of the West Indian wife resembles that of Rhys herself in many ways. In order to present the alien wife’s case, she has written a “counter-text,” an extension of Brontë’s novel filling in the “missing” testimony, the issues over which Brontë glosses.

Wide Sargasso Sea consists of two parts. Part 1 is narrated by the girl growing up in Jamaica who is destined to become Rochester’s wife. The Emancipation Act has just been passed (the year of that imperial edict was 1833) and the blacks on the island are passing through a period of so-called apprenticeship which should lead to their complete freedom in 1837. This is a period of racial tension and anxiety for the privileged colonial community. Fear of black violence runs high, and no one knows exactly what will happen to the landholders once the blacks are emancipated. The girlish narrator lives in the interface between the privileged white colonists and the blacks. Although a child of landowners, she is impoverished, clinging to European notions of respectability, and in constant fear. She lives on the crumbling estate of her widowed mother. Her closest associate is Christophine, a Martinique obeah woman, or Voodoo witch. When her mother marries Mr. Mason, the family’s lot improves temporarily, until the blacks revolt, burning their country home, Coulibri, and killing her half-witted brother. She then attends a repressive Catholic school in town, where her kindly colored “cousin” Sandi protects her from more hostile blacks.

Part 2 is narrated by the young Rochester on his honeymoon with his bride to her country home. Wherever appropriate, Rhys follows the details of Brontë’s story. Rochester reveals that his marriage was merely a financial arrangement. After an uneasy period of passion, Rochester’s feelings for his bride begin to cool. He receives a letter of denunciation accusing her of misbehavior with Sandi and revealing that madness runs in the family. To counter Rochester’s growing hostility, the young bride goes to her former companion, the obeah woman Christophine, for a love potion. The nature of the potion is that it can work for one night only. Nevertheless, she administers it to her husband. His love now dead, she is torn from her native land, transported to a cruel and loveless England, and maddeningly confined. Finally, she takes candle in hand to fire Rochester’s house in suicidal destruction.

In Brontë’s novel, the character of the mad wife is strangely blank, a vacant slot in the story. Her presence is essential, and she must be fearfully hateful, so that Jane Eyre has no qualms about taking her place in Rochester’s arms, but the novel tells the reader almost nothing else about her. Rhys fills in this blank, fleshing out the character, making her live on a par with Jane herself. After all, Brontë tells the reader a great deal about Jane’s painful childhood and education; why should Rhys not supply the equivalent information about her dark rival?

It is not unprecedented for a writer to develop a fiction from another writer’s work. For example, T. H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose (1946) imagines that some of Jonathan Swift’s Lilliputians were transported to England, escaped captivity, and established a thriving colony in an abandoned English garden, where they are discovered by an English schoolgirl. Her intrusion into their world is a paradigm of British colonial paternalism, finally overcome by the intelligence and good feeling of the girl. This charming story depends on Swift’s fiction, but the relationship of White’s work to Swift’s is completely different from the relationship of Rhys’s work to Brontë’s. Rhys’s fiction permanently alters one’s understanding of Jane Eyre. Approaching Brontë’s work after Rhys’s, one is compelled to ask such questions as, “Why is Jane so uncritical of Rochester?” and, “How is Jane herself like the madwoman in the attic?” Rhys’s fiction reaches into the past and alters Brontë’s novel.

Rhys’s approach in Wide Sargasso Sea was also influenced by FordMadox Ford and, through Ford, Joseph Conrad. In the autumn of 1924, when Rhys first met Ford, he was writing Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance. Some thirty years earlier, when Joseph Conrad was just beginning his career as a writer, his agent had introduced him to Ford in hopes that they could work in collaboration, since Conrad wrote English (a language he had adopted only as an adult) with great labor. Ford and Conrad produced The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903) as coauthors. During their years of association, Ford had some hand in the production of several works usually considered Conrad’s sole effort, although it has never been clear to what degree Ford participated in the creation of the fiction of Conrad’s middle period. About 1909, after Ford’s disreputable ways had become increasingly offensive to Conrad’s wife, the two men parted ways. Immediately after Conrad’s death in 1924, however, Ford rushed into print his memoir of the famous author. His memoir of Conrad is fictionalized and hardly to be trusted as an account of their association in the 1890’s, but it sheds a great deal of light on what Ford thought about writing fiction in 1924, when he was beginning his powerful Tietjens tetralogy and working for the first time with Rhys. Ford claimed that he and Conrad invented literary impressionism in English. Impressionist fiction characteristically employs limited and unreliable narration, follows a flow of associated ideas leaping freely in time and space, aims to render the impression of a scene vividly so as to make the reader see it as if it were before his eyes, and artfully selects and juxtaposes seemingly unrelated scenes and episodes so that the reader must construct the connections and relationships that make the story intelligible. These are the stylistic features of Rhys’s fiction, as well as of Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915), Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), and Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).

Art gallery

  Ajanta Exhibition was arranged by Shree Khodidas Parmar Art Foundation at Sardarnagar, Bhavnagar at 24 to 26 September 2021 from 10 am to 8pm

 This was our thinking activity task which was given by Dilip Barad sir, In this, we have to visit the exhibition but who are not at Bhavnagar they also got chance to see all photos of Ajanta Exhibition.

 In this, we can see many pictures are of god and goddess and some are lovemaking picture, in this picture they have tried to portray a culture or tradition of people or thought of painters. we can see the painter has used a necklace and in some of the pictures we can see animals. By that, he is trying to share some historical events. In some of the pictures, buddha is also portrayed.

 We can also see some of the natural elements like flowers, Birds elephants, and two cows are fighting in that we can see the color defense which saw that they both have different types of opponents.

We can see many photos like Syama painting, Apshera with her beautiful dresses and jewelry, Rajkumari Apsara with beauty and then pada pani painting, Sidhartha painting,Gotam   Bhuddh painting, Ajanta's glumes, Indra, we also knew about manushi, then saw raja rani panting they are sharing or sparing love, In one of the pictures we saw queen expiration.

In this picture, we can see one is the lady who is with his small baby ,we can also see the kindness of both and how they both are looking innocent any we can see ho mother is protecting his child we can see mother and son is well dress that shows that they are from good family and how people used to dress up in older times.

 

In this we can see man and women are portrayed which show that they are equal and the are in same space and all are in same position and we can see all have different types of mindset that is the reason we are having clash.

So, this was my experience about pictures and I enjoyed watching this type of picture which is telling about History .

ih

So, I hope u enjoyed it.

Foe

 Q. 1 – How would you differentiate the character of Cruso and Crusoe?.

Robinson is the protagonist and the narrator of the novel. He is individualistic, self-reliant, and adventurous. He continually discounts the good advice and warnings of his parents and others, and boldly seeks to make his own life by going to sea. He is at times overly ambitious and is unable to remain content with a comfortable life . Trapped on his island, he learns to survive all alone and also ends up becoming a devout Christian, repenting for his past sins and gaining a newfound confidence in God and his divine plan of providence. Robinson's extreme individualism is at times heroic, but also leads him to disregard others. While he values the loyal friends he finds over the course of his journeys , he sells Xury into a kind of slavery or indentured servitude and treats Friday as an inferior servant. His self-reliance can also shade into narcissism, reflected in his narration's focus on himself and disregard for others: most of the other characters in the novel don't even get a name. But in spite of any of these faults, Defoe presents Robinson as the novel's intrepid hero, who draws on reserves of ingenuity and bravery to survive incredibly against the whims of nature and fate.

While Friday retains the same name in Foe as in Robinson Crusoe, Robinson Crusoe’s name is changed to “Cruso” which marks the first in a series of differences between the character of Cruso(e) in Foe and Robinson Crusoe. The Cruso that Susan describes in the quote is one who is completely disconnected from reality and confused about his own past. When Susan questions Cruso about his history on the island the details in his stories vary wildly each time they are told. When asked if Friday was a child when he came to the island Cruso would sometimes exclaim, “Aye, a child, a mere child”, but other times Cruso would say, “Friday was a cannibal whom he had saved from being roasted” . This uncertainty about events could stem from the fact that in Foe, Cruso is very against keeping written documentation of his days on the island; proclaiming, “Nothing I have forgotten is worth remembering” .

Cruso’s lack of journaling is a stark contrast to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Robinson Crusoe is much less passive and senile in regards to his own development on the island. Crusoe kept a painfully detailed account of every action he does on the island in a journal he updates daily. In this journal, Crusoe meticulously records every step for all of the tools he crafts, and he writes about his own progress with his newly acquitted relationship with religion. This Robinson Crusoe is much more in tune with his own reality and interested in his own accomplishments than Foe’s Cruso. This is also evident in the number of tools and objects that Robinson Crusoe makes in comparison to Cruso. Robinson Crusoe fills his multiple homes with various types of pots, tables, chairs, fences, and even a canoe. All of these items Crusoe builds are to improve and aide in his growth on the island, and he must be mentally sharp in order to build these items. Cruso in Foe has not put any effort towards building tools, as he only has a bed when Susan arrives at the island, and from the quote, it seems like he may not have the mental capacity to build these tools. Although Cruso does builds many terraces, he exclaims that they are for the future generations and not himself.

One explanation for the difference in mindset and mental stability in the two Robinson Crusoe’s may be that in Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe felt that his island life had more value than Cruso did. Before becoming stranded on the island, religion wasn’t a focus in Robinson Crusoe’s life, and he frequently sinned; such as when he disobeyed his father. After becoming stranded on the island, Crusoe began to read the bible and incorporate God into his daily thoughts and actions. Crusoe expressed deep regret for his sinful past, and often attributed hardships to a lesson from God. This newfound life style gave significant meaning to Crusoe’s daily actions as they represented growth in his faith, and a positive change in character. For Cruso, the island did not lead him to make any significant changes in his character or ideals. Therefore, his daily actions had less significance to him, and when his reality and sense of self began to slip away from him he was not concerned.

Q.2 Friday’s characteristics and persona in Foe and in Robinson Crusoe.

 Foe and Robinson Crusoe is important, but so is acknowledging their different racial identities. Friday in Foe’s work, in standing for the victims of apartheid and slavery, is a black African character ‘he was black, negro, with a head of fuzzy wool’ , whereas Crusoe’s Friday, not standing for those causes, is portrayed as being an anglicised version of a Caribbean man, who ‘had all the sweetness and softness of a European in his countenance’. This implies that Friday was somehow better than the ‘average’ Caribbean tribesman by dint of looking somewhat European, but at the same time, the first language Crusoe taught him was that he was his master. He was an improvement on the average savage, since his appearance was somewhat European, but still his race left him to be the natural servant of Crusoe. This Friday is very much a dramatic device used to portray Crusoe’s development as a religious man; ‘began to instruct him  in the knowledge of the true God’. This allowed Defoe to expand on Crusoe’s earlier mentions of religion, in his conversion, and in the hegemony of the time, caused Crusoe to be seen as a good and moral character, who treated his slave well, and brought him up to be religious . In Coetzee’s work, Friday is allowed to be sullen and unpleasant, easy to see, but hard to like, he is created to be the embodiment of all the oppression experienced by a racial group, to only be able to take in, never to give out ideas or understanding, to be central to a story he can have no part in. The silence of Coetzee’s Friday could also be said to reflect the reader, who, like Friday can only react and respond to situations. Katherine Wagner however argues against this, saying that ‘criticism and silence are mutually exclusive terms’. Coetzee’s Friday can only be silenced, but Defoe’s Friday has no room to criticise, and no part in making decisions for Crusoe, because in that time, a slave wouldn’t have that option at all, Coetzee’s Friday can take no part, being unable to speak. His isolation and treatment as second class is made far more visible by his disability, a device Coetzee used to avoid speaking the black voice, as a privileged white man, whilst still drawing attention to the plight of slaves.

Crusoe, Cruso and Barton were all seen to treat Friday very differently, but all see him as a possession in their own way. Crusoe did this most blatantly, in claiming, naming Friday and instructing him to call him ‘Master’, with Defoe’s Friday being portrayed as making signs of ‘subjection, servitude, and submission’ to Crusoe without even any bidding. This added to the moral message of Robinson Crusoe, because it showed the savage being tamed, and later taught religion. This contrasts strongly with the Cruso created by Coetzee, who was ‘sullen’ in his service, who obeyed Cruso, but did not have the childish excitement or ‘comically expressed pidgin’ portrayed in places by Defoe. Barton also claimed him, despite trying to treat him as an individual ‘if Friday is not mine to set free, whose is he’, and on some level saw him clearly as her property, forgetting that maybe it was not her right to set him free either. 

The representation of Friday in these two texts is vastly different, and one could hardly believe that the two were in fact the same character. With different histories, and different personalities, in fact all both have in common is playing the role of the non-white slave in the text, to serve a literary purpose, in both reflecting the views of wider society towards non-white people, and in showing the development of other characters. This is not to say that either Friday was one-dimensional, in particular Coetzee’s Friday was multi-dimensional and complex, but more that despite the character complexity, despite his being ‘resistant to being interpreted’ , and how central they were, both were created to serve only a purpose.

Q. 3 Who is Protagonist?

Susan, the protagonist of the story, is a British woman who went searching for her lost daughter. After searching for two years, she gives up and tries to return to England, only to be caught in the middle of a mutiny and marooned by the crew of the ship she riding home.

Film Screening Mahesh Dattani’s "The Final Solutions"

1. What is the difference between the movie and the play?

I think there is not much difference between the movie and the play but we can see that movie is not able to capture all the things which is added in the play and I would like to say that yes from watching the movie we can get the storyline but if we want to see the reality or real situation of that time that women were facing at that time or what type of mindset the people were having about Indian people and Muslim people then we should read play. movie has also tried to include all the parts but for good understanding it is important.

2. Does the movie help you to understand the narrative structure of the play?

Yes, I agree that the movie helps you to understand the narrative structure of the play, as we can see in the starting we can see how Daksha is alone and there is no one with whom she can share his feeling or say that what problem she is facing and she is writing a letter because there is no one who can talk with her. then we also knew about Zarine that she is liking to listen to songs then we also saw in the movie that how the crowd behaves with Javed and Bobby and why Ramnik wanted to give the job to that both people.so, the movie is helpful.

3. Do you think the movie is helpful to understand the viewpoints of different characters?

yes, the movie is helpful to understand the viewpoints of different characters because while watching we will see that all person is having different types of options and they all are having a different types of mindsets we can see that movie is helping to know the viewpoint that how their views are somehow match with each other and sometimes they are not agreeing to it

4. If you were the director of the movie, what kind of changes would you make in the movie. Does the movie do justice to the play?

If I am the Director then I would like to make a character growth by not sticking toll rules and regulations. I would make Daksha a character who is brave and who stands for his right and in the starting when Daksha was 15 years old that time she is coy but when she is 54 at that time she is modern and Brave and taking a stand. when Smita is calling Tasneem's parents at that time I would include smita as a modern girl. and I would like to include that when Daksha's first husband dies then she fall in love with Muslim guy and from there here life takes a turn .

Cultural Studies: Media, Power and Truly Educated Person

Cultural Studies: Media, Power and Truly Educated Person

 Radio, television, film, and the other products of media culture provide materials out of which we forge our very identities; our sense of selfhood; our notion of what it means to be male or female; our sense of class, of ethnicity and race, of nationality, of sexuality; and of "us" and "them." Media images help shape our view of the world and our deepest values: what we consider good or bad, positive or negative, moral or evil. Media stories provide the symbols, myths, and resources through which we constitute a common culture and through the appropriation of which we insert ourselves into this culture. Media spectacles demonstrate who has power and who is powerless, who is allowed to exercise force and violence, and who is not. They dramatize and legitimate the power of the forces that be and show the powerless that they must stay in their places or be oppressed.

      We are immersed from cradle to grave in a media and consumer society and thus it is important to learn how to understand, interpret, and criticize its meanings and messages. The media are a profound and often misperceived source of cultural pedagogy: They contribute to educating us how to behave and what to think, feel, believe, fear, and desire -- and what not to. The media are forms of pedagogy which teach us how to be men and women. They show us how to dress, look and consume; how to react to members of different social groups; how to be popular and successful and how to avoid failure; and how to conform to the dominant system of norms, values, practices, and institutions. Consequently, the gaining of critical media literacy is an important resource for individuals and citizens in learning how to cope with a seductive cultural environment. Learning how to read, criticize, and resist socio-cultural manipulation can help empower oneself in relation to dominant forms of media and culture. It can enhance individual sovereignty vis-a-vis media culture and give people more power over their cultural environment.

      In this essay, I will discuss the potential contributions of a cultural studies perspective to media critique and literacy. In recent years, cultural studies has emerged as a set of approaches to the study of culture and society. The project was inaugurated by the University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies which developed a variety of critical methods for the analysis, interpretation, and criticism of cultural artifacts.[1] Through a set of internal debates, and responding to social struggles and movements of the 1960s and the 1970s, the Birmingham group came to focus on the interplay of representations and ideologies of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality in cultural texts, including media culture. They were among the first to study the effects of newspapers, radio, television, film, and other popular cultural forms on audiences. They also focused on how various audiences interpreted and used media culture differently, analyzing the factors that made different audiences respond in contrasting ways to various media texts.

      Through studies of youth subcultures, British cultural studies demonstrated how culture came to constitute distinct forms of identity and group membership. For cultural studies, media culture provides the materials for constructing views of the world, behavior, and even identities. Those who uncritically follow the dictates of media culture tend to "mainstream" themselves, conforming to the dominant fashion, values, and behavior. Yet cultural studies is also interested in how subcultural groups and individuals resist dominant forms of culture and identity, creating their own style and identities. Those who obey ruling dress and fashion codes, behavior, and political ideologies thus produce their identities within mainstream group, as members of specific social groupings (such as white, middle-class conservative Americans). Persons who identify with subcultures, like punk culture, or black nationalist subcultures, look and act differently from those in the mainstream, and thus create oppositional identities, defining themselves against standard models.

       Cultural studies insists that culture must be studied within the social relations and system through which culture is produced and consumed, and that thus study of culture is intimately bound up with the study of society, politics, and economics. Cultural studies shows how media culture articulates the dominant values, political ideologies, and social developments and novelties of the era. It conceives of U.S. culture and society as a contested terrain with various groups and ideologies struggling for dominance (Kellner 1995). Television, film, music, and other popular cultural forms are thus often liberal or conservative, or occasionally express more radical or oppositional views.

      Cultural studies is valuable because it provides some tools that enable one to read and interpret one's culture critically. It also subverts distinctions between "high" and "low" culture by considering a wide continuum of cultural artifacts ranging from novels to television and by refusing to erect any specific cultural hierarchies or canons. Previous approaches to culture tended to be primarily literary and elitist, dismissing media culture as banal, trashy, and not worthy of serious attention. The project of cultural studies, by contrast, avoids cutting the field of culture into high and low, or popular against elite. Such distinctions are difficult to maintain and generally serve as a front for normative aesthetic valuations and, often, a political program (i.e. either dismissing mass culture for high culture, or celebrating what is deemed "popular" while scorning "elitist" high culture).

      Cultural studies allows us to examine and critically scrutinize the whole range of culture without prior prejudices toward one or another sort of cultural text, institution, or practice. It also opens the way toward more differentiated political, rather than aesthetic, valuations of cultural artifacts in which one attempts to distinguish critical and oppositional from conformist and conservative moments in a cultural artifact. For instance, studies of Hollywood film show how key 1960s films promoted the views of radicals and the counterculture and how film in the 1970s was a battleground between liberal and conservative positions; late 1970s films, however, tended toward conservative positions that helped elect Ronald Reagan as president (See Kellner and Ryan, 1988).

      There is an intrinsically critical and political dimension to the project of cultural studies which distinguishes it from objectivist and apolitical academic approaches to the study of culture and society. British cultural studies, for example, analyzed culture historically in the context of its societal origins and effects. It situated culture within a theory of social production and reproduction, specifying the ways that cultural forms served either to further social domination or to enable people to resist and struggle against domination. It analyzed society as a hierarchical and antagonistic set of social relations characterized by the oppression of subordinate class, gender, race, ethnic, and national strata. Employing Gramsci's model of hegemony and counterhegemony, it sought to analyze "hegemonic," or ruling, social and cultural forces of domination and to seek "counterhegemonic" forces of resistance and struggle. The project was aimed at social transformation and attempted to specify forces of domination and resistance in order to aid the process of political struggle and emancipation from oppression and domination.

      For cultural studies, the concept of ideology is of central importance, for dominant ideologies serve to reproduce social relations of domination and subordination.[2] Ideologies of class, for instance, celebrate upper class life and denigrate the working class. Ideologies of gender promote sexist representations of women and ideologies of race utilize racist representations of people of color and various minority groups. Ideologies make inequalities and subordination appear natural and just, and thus induce consent to relations of domination. Contemporary societies are structured by opposing groups who have different political ideologies (liberal, conservative, radical, etc.) and cultural studies specifies what, if any, ideologies are operative in a given cultural artifact (which could involved, of course, the specification of ideological contradictions). In the course of this study, I will provide some examples of how different ideologies are operative in media cultural texts and will accordingly provide examples of ideological analysis and critique.

      Because of its focus on representations of race, gender, and class, and its critique of ideologies that promote various forms of oppression, cultural studies lends itself to a multiculturalist program that demonstrates how culture reproduces certain forms of racism, sexism, and biases against members of subordinate classes, social groups, or alternative life-styles. Multiculturalism affirms the worth of different types of culture and cultural groups, claiming, for instance, that black, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, and lesbian, and other oppressed and marginal voices have their own validity and importance. An insurgent multiculturalism attempts to show how various people's voices and experiences are silenced and omitted from mainstream culture and struggles to aid in the articulation of diverse views, experiences, and cultural forms, from groups excluded from the mainstream. This makes it a target of conservative forces who wish to preserve the existing canons of white male, Euro-centric privilege and thus attack multiculturalism in cultural wars raging from the 1960s to the present over education, the arts, and the limits of free expression.

      Cultural studies thus promotes a multiculturalist politics and media pedagogy that aims to make people sensitive to how relations of power and domination are "encoded" in cultural texts, such as those of television or film. But it also specifies how people can resist the dominant encoded meanings and produce their own critical and alternative readings. Cultural studies can show how media culture manipulates and indoctrinates us, and thus can empower individuals to resist the dominant meanings in media cultural products and to produce their own meanings. It can also point to moments of resistance and criticism within media culture and thus help promote development of more critical consciousness.

      A critical cultural studies -- embodied in many of the articles collected in this reader -- thus develops concepts and analyses that will enable readers to analytically dissect the artifacts of contemporary media culture and to gain power over their cultural environment. By exposing the entire field of culture to knowledgeable scrutiny, cultural studies provides a broad, comprehensive framework to undertake studies of culture, politics, and society for the purposes of individual empowerment and social and political struggle and transformation. In the following pages, I will therefore indicate some of the chief components of the type of cultural studies that I find most useful.