Flipped Learning Task on Existentialism

 Hello readers !

               Once again warmly welcome to my blog. This blog is a part of my thinking activity task. In this blog I have to write about the short videos of Existentialism. This task assigned by our professor Dr. Dilip Barad sir.

CLICK HERE to watch all the videos and batter understanding the existentialism....

💠 Video : 1

              The first video gives us to basic understanding of Existentialism. It focuses on making triangle of freedom, passion and individuality which plays a very vital role in thinking of existentialism and also talks about philosophical suicide.

💠 Video : 2

            In this second video Albert Camus talks about absurdity in life. We think suicide as the escapism from the absurdity of life. When we start to think about absurdity this idea of suicide comes in mind. But it is not a solution. Life is meaningless yet it is for living.

💠 Video-3

When we kill our self as a philosopher it is called the philosophical suicide. It comes out from human being. If there is no human being, there won’t be any desire. All requirements like a total absence of hope, a continual reflection, conscious dissatisfaction should not be confused with despair, renunciation, immature unrest.

💠 Video-4

In the Dadaism it’s primary goal is creation. There is no need to govern by the value of others. We must have to create our own values which have significance in our life. Dadaism and Nihilism both neglect the values which are imposed by other.

💠Video-5

Existentialist came with post war movement. At that time people were living in despair and their life was full with absurdity. Everyone is free to make their own choice and choose their own path but when the result comes in negative way. At that time also we have to be ready to face it. Being individual is not in actual sense connect with being narcissist.

💠Video-6

The difference between Existentialism and Nihilism is about subjectivity and objectivity.

💠Video-7

Existentialism raises questions like Why I am here? What is the meaning of life? It also talks about divine perspective and human perspective. We can not find the meaning of life in divine perspective because it removes morality which is very important in human perspective.

💠Video-8

“Ubermensche” is a philosophy of freedom given by Friedrich Nietzsche. Humans are free to make their choice. There is no need to live life according to any supernatural power. Only we are the master of our life.

💠Video- 9

Existentialism is a very broad idea to understand the deeper meaning of life. Existentialism is not apply to the mind but also apply to the heart which is called existential sensibility. It means that as a mind wants to know the meaning of life heart also wants to enjoy or feel it.

💠Video-10

There is a difference between essentialism and existentialism. As a human being only after the birth we can decide our essence by our choice. The meaning of life is only given by us otherwise there is no meaning of life.

💠Which video I like the Most and Why?

From all these I like the last video. This video talks about how to live a life by making our own individual identity rather than to follow the ideas of others. From this video we can learn that to make our own path in this world is very important.

"Breath" short Play by Samuel Beckett

 Hello readers !

             Once again  warmly welcome to my blog.  We all very well know about the Absurd theatre and many absurd plays of Samuel Beckett. So, here I'm putting my views about the short Play "Breath" by Samuel Beckett. This task assigned by our professor Dr. Dilip Barad sir. In this task we have to shoot one thirty second video  to shaw our creativity. So first I'll give you a brief introduction about auther. 

                 Samuel Barclay Beckett (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. A resident of Paris for most of his adult life, he wrote in both French and English. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd". His best-known work is his 1953 play Waiting for Godot.

               Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation." He was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984.

💠 "Breath" short Play :-

                     "Breath" is a thirty second short Play by Samuel Beckett. This is one absurd play. The title of the play Breath is very significant. It significant link between life and death. 

👉  The script of the play :

CURTAIN Up

1. Faint light on stage littered with miscellaneous rubbish. Hold about five seconds.

2. Faint brief cry and immediately inspiration and slow increase of light together reaching maximum - together in about ten seconds. Silence and hold for about five seconds.

3. Expiration and slow decrease of light together reaching minimum together (light as in 1) in about ten seconds and immediately cry as before. Silence and hold about five seconds. 

CURTAIN Down

💠

So, here I'm putting my video of "Breath" short Play by Samuel Beckett. This video shoot by me and Nirali Makvana. In this video we have used various kind of garbage and sound of breath. I hope you will like this video. 

Thank you ........

Eco-criticism by Devang Nanavati

 Hello readers !

All ecological criticism shares the fundamental premise that human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it

~ Cheryll Glotfelty

                Once again warmly welcome to my blog. On 10th November 2020 we had fruitful talk on Eco-criticism with the reference of  Sitanshu Yashaschandra's poem "Tree Once Again" by Devang Nanavati sir. This wonderful session organised by Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.

💠 About speaker introduction :

                    Devang Nanavati sir is formar gold medalist student of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University. And he is Ph.D scholar from M. S. University of Baroda. And also he is translator of poems and short Stories and etc.

                      Devang Nanavati sir who introduced the poem " Tree Once Again" is English translation of a Gujarati poem 'ફરી પાછું વૃક્ષ'  to the reference of Eco-criticism. In this session he had  discussed various kind of example like , Chipko Movement and  Gunjan Gandhi - Jessica de Koninck's Poems. 

💠 Eco-criticism : 

                      Ecocriticism is an intentionally broad approach that is known by a number of other designations, including “green (cultural) studies”, “ecopoetics”, and “environmental literary criticism.” Ecocriticism investigates the relation between humans and the natural world in literature. It deals with how environmental issues, cultural issues concerning the environment and attitudes towards nature are presented and analyzed. One of the main goals in ecocriticism is to study how individuals in society behave and react in relation to nature and ecological aspects. 

Thank you......

The Scarlet Letter Novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne

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             Welcome to my blog. We all know that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century romance The Scarlet Letter centers on the simple transgression of adultery and its social consequences. Hawthorne’s narrative and storytelling skill, however, are far from simple; the author manages to subtly and cleverly set the tale within a framework of other transgressions. Ideas of space and other social constructions, including language and belief systems, are tested and subverted in this description of a seventeenth-century Puritan settlement. 

💠 About author Nathaniel Hawthorne :

                      Nathaniel Hawthorne, born on July 4, 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts was an American short story writer and romance novelist who experimented with a broad range of styles and genres. He is best known for his short stories and two widely read novels: The Scarlet Letter (mid-March 1850) and The House of Seven Gables (1851). Along with Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe much of Hawthorne's work belongs to the sub-genre of Dark Romanticism, distinguished by an emphasis on human fallibility that gives rise to lapses in judgement that allow even good men and women to drift toward sin and self-destruction. Dark Romantics tends to draw attention to the unintended consequences and complications that arise from well-intended efforts at social reform. Melville dedicated his epic novel, Moby-Dick to Hawthorne: "In token of my admiration for his genius." Hawthorne's lesser-known poems exemplify Dark Romanticism; some of his darkest works, including his ghost stories and tales involving the supernatural, fall within the genre of Gothic Literature.

💠 Scarlet letter :-

                  The Scarlet Letter opens with a long preamble about how the book came to be written. The nameless narrator was the surveyor of the customhouse in Salem, Massachusetts. In the customhouse’s attic, he discovered a number of documents, among them a manuscript that was bundled with a scarlet, gold-embroidered patch of cloth in the shape of an “A.” The manuscript, the work of a past surveyor, detailed events that occurred some two hundred years before the narrator’s time. When the narrator lost his customs post, he decided to write a fictional account of the events recorded in the manuscript. The Scarlet Letter is the final product.

                The story begins in seventeenth-century Boston, then a Puritan settlement. A young woman, Hester Prynne, is led from the town prison with her infant daughter, Pearl, in her arms and the scarlet letter “A” on her breast. A man in the crowd tells an elderly onlooker that Hester is being punished for adultery. Hester’s husband, a scholar much older than she is, sent her ahead to America, but he never arrived in Boston. The consensus is that he has been lost at sea. While waiting for her husband, Hester has apparently had an affair, as she has given birth to a child. She will not reveal her lover’s identity, however, and the scarlet letter, along with her public shaming, is her punishment for her sin and her secrecy. On this day Hester is led to the town scaffold and harangued by the town fathers, but she again refuses to identify her child’s father.

              The elderly onlooker is Hester’s missing husband, who is now practicing medicine and calling himself Roger Chillingworth. He settles in Boston, intent on revenge. He reveals his true identity to no one but Hester, whom he has sworn to secrecy. Several years pass. Hester supports herself by working as a seamstress, and Pearl grows into a willful, impish child. Shunned by the community, they live in a small cottage on the outskirts of Boston. Community officials attempt to take Pearl away from Hester, but, with the help of Arthur Dimmesdale, a young and eloquent minister, the mother and daughter manage to stay together. Dimmesdale, however, appears to be wasting away and suffers from mysterious heart trouble, seemingly caused by psychological distress. Chillingworth attaches himself to the ailing minister and eventually moves in with him so that he can provide his patient with round-the-clock care. Chillingworth also suspects that there may be a connection between the minister’s torments and Hester’s secret, and he begins to test Dimmesdale to see what he can learn. One afternoon, while the minister sleeps, Chillingworth discovers a mark on the man’s breast (the details of which are kept from the reader), which convinces him that his suspicions are correct.

             At the end Frustrated in his revenge, Chillingworth dies a year later. Hester and Pearl leave Boston, and no one knows what has happened to them. Many years later, Hester returns alone, still wearing the scarlet letter, to live in her old cottage and resume her charitable work. She receives occasional letters from Pearl, who has married a European aristocrat and established a family of her own. When Hester dies, she is buried next to Dimmesdale. The two share a single tombstone, which bears a scarlet “A.”

👉 In the Scarlet letter we find verious themes and these all themes played a vital role in the novel. These all themes are ,

           

💠 The Scarlet Letter  movie :

Thank you........

Movie review : post-colonial study

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             Warmly welcome to my blog. This blog is part of my thinking activity task which  was assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad sir. In this particular task we have to write some of movie reviews with the reference of postcolonial perspective. 

👉CLICK HERE to view more about this task..........

💠Midnight's Children :

• Director :Deepa Mehta
• Writer : Salman Rushdie
• Running Time : 2h 26m
• Genre : Drama

                    The bigger story, about India, is told through a smaller one, about a family, and especially one boy: Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of the midnight hour on Aug. 15, 1947, the very moment of India’s birth as a free country. There are 1,001 children born at that hour, all with special powers, but many have died by the time Saleem  discovers that he can hear the other children’s voices in his head as if he were some kind of all-India radio.

                    Ms. Mehta seems most at home detailing the family life of the young Saleem in Bombay. The two women who rule that universe, his mother (Shahana Goswami) and the ayah (Seema Biswas) — the perpetrator of that baby switching — give the film emotional ballast that’s lost when Saleem leaves for Pakistan.

💠 The Black Prince :-

• Director: Kavi Raz
• Writer : Kavi Raz
• Running Time : 1h 58m
• Genres : Drama, History

                   The movie based on the true story of Duleep Singh, the last maharajah of Punjab, “The Black Prince,” written and directed by Mr. Raz, never finds a rhythm. Worse, Duleep remains a handsome cipher, brooding in the shadows of his own story until, upon occasion, someone thinks to ask, “What troubles you?”

                   The youngest son of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, ruler of northwestern India, the “Lion of Punjab” and the only child of Maharani Jindan Kaur (Shabana Azmi), Duleep Singh (Satinder Sartaaj) was crowned at the age of five, but was forcibly exiled to Britain, almost immediately after, where he became a favourite of Queen Victoria (Amanda Root). He survived even during the division and bloodshed as four potential successors got killed, and the British watched like “vultures”.

       He gets to learn about God, Christianity and other social etiquettes by his guardian, Dr Login , and is told that India benefited by the British rule. He is respectful to all but an uncanny sense of unease begins to discomfort him as he longs to see his real mother, who he is categorically told is “old and too weak to travel”. Perhaps the latent desire to be with his countrymen also begins to rekindle in him an inexplicable concern for the land of his birth: Punjab. When he gets permission to bring her to England, he gets more and more influenced by her to reclaim his birthright and overturn the escalating oppression of India by British colonialists.

💠The Reluctant Fundamentalist :

                  Mira Nair's "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" follows the transformations of the wide-eyed Pakistani Changez Khan , who arrives in the US with great professional ambitions. And he accomplishes much before the planes hit the World Trade Center, a crisis that challenges his materialism, leading him to step back from the many choices he's made, in his capitalist career and his love life. 

He narrates his story, seen in flashback, while meeting in the Pak Tea House in Lahore with American journalist Bobby Lincoln (Liev Schreiber). Quite bulky for a journalist, with something strange in his posture, Lincoln seems out of place. A local American professor has just been kidnapped. Khan, who has long since abandoned his clean-shaven face and American business suit for a beard and traditional Shalvar-Kameez, is now the leader of a questionable Pakistani activist movement. Lincoln thinks he might have some answers, but Khan insists on telling his own life story first. The choice seems odd, considering that a man's life is in danger.

            Nair has made a very smart film, whose ambitions sometimes exceed the piece's depths. "The world changed on 9/11" was a phrase we used to hear all the time. The film left me wondering how many of us were compelled to re-evaluate our own individual paths or modify our moral and political priorities during the long wars in the years that followed. Is Khan the exception? For the rest of us, then and now, as things around us get more nasty and complicated, life goes on.

Thank you....

Imaginary Homelands: Selected Essays by Salman Rushdie

 Hello readers !

“Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.”

                                      ~Salman Rushdie

           

               Imaginary Homelands is a collection of essays written by Salman Rushdie. Salman Rushdie is the most controversial writer among Indian writing in English. His book, Imaginary Homeland, are essays written during 1981 to 1992, collecting controversial issues of the decade. 

 Here in this collection of essays we have studied these fore essays like ,

• Imaginary Homeland
•  Attenborough’s Gandhi
•  Commonwealth literature Does not Exist
• New Empire within British

💠 Imaginary Homeland :

        Salman Rushdie's 'Imaginary Homelands' is a narrative portraying a migrant's inner conflict between his strong urge to reclaim his homeland and his inability to capture its true essence. This conflict leads the author to create a number of "imaginary" homelands in his fictions such as, an India of the mind in 'The Satanic Verses'. While they are not precisely real, these imaginary homelands capture the essence of reality as seen through the eyes of character who, like their author, face the challenge of straddling two cultures.

💠 Attenborough’s Gandhi :-

                           Attenborough’s Gandhi” is also a part of his essay collection. It is also an essay in which he is reviewed about Richard Attenborough’s Movie “Gandhi” Salman Rushdie has some problem with making this movie and he highly criticized this movie by giving valid argument and points. He is deconstructing this movie by giving some rational argument. At some points as he also would have been appreciated this movie for few scene’s. 

                  The essay starts with the word ‘Deification’, and Rushdie further said that deification is an Indian disease, as Attenborough might now about it and he has construct Gandhi as a ‘Mahatma’, as it is Indian disease to say that ‘Avatar’ will come and do something good for human being and they makes a human as a ‘Avatar’ and console their human self and depend over avatar and Attenborough has do it in the movie. But he has not described. ‘Gandhi-a gift human’ and Attenborough knows that what Indian like and for what Oscar-Nobel committee would be like and for that he has just put the image of Gandhi as a Mahatma and has avoided Nathuram Godse’s speech, ploticalthriller also absent in the movie.

He also gives the three broad headings

1. Spiritualist

2. Simplicity

3. Change anything, Submit yourself

💠 Reference :

Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands. Granta Books, 1991. PDF.

Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon

 Hello readers !

               Welcome to my blog. This blog is a part of my thinking activity task wich was assigned by Dr. Barad sir. In this particular blog I have to write about my understanding about the work "Black Skin, White Masks".  A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements around the world, Black Skin, White Masks is the unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world. 

💠 About Author :-

                Frantz Fanon  was  born on the island of Martinique under French colonial rule, Frantz Omar Fanon (1925–1961) was one of the most important writers in black Atlantic theory in an age of anti-colonial liberation struggle. His work drew on a wide array of poetry, psychology, philosophy, and political theory, and its influence across the global South has been wide, deep, and enduring. 

             Fanon engaged the fundamental issues of his day: language, affect, sexuality, gender, race and racism, religion, social formation, time, and many others.

💠 BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS :-

"I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos -- and the white man, however intelligent he may be, is incapable of understanding Louis Armstrong or songs from the Congo. I am black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a drop of sun under the earth."

                       In Black Skin, White Masks – first published in 1952 – Frantz Fanon offers a potent philosophical, clinical, literary and political analysis of the deep effects of racism and colonialism on the experiences, lives, minds and relationships of black people and people of colour. And also this book about the mindset or psychology of Racism. This book divided into seven chapters with conclusion. These seven chapters are ,

💠 The problem of Blackness :-

                         The book "Black Skin, White Masks" moving away from blackness as a problem perhaps the problem of the modern world towards the wider theory of  oppressed, colonialism, and revolutionary resistance to the reach of coloniality as a system. But that shift is unthinkable without Fanon’s early meditations on anti-Black racism.  The second and third chapters of Black Skin, White Masks theorize interracial sexuality, sexual desire, and the effects on racial identity. Fanon’s theorizations return to one and the same theme: interracial desire as a form of self-destruction in the desire to be white or to elevate one’s social, political, and cultural status in proximity to whiteness.

💠 Reference :-

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Tr. Richard Philcox, Grove Press, 2008.

The Tempest by William Shakespeare

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                    Once again warmly welcome to my blog. We all know that Post- colonial literature played vital role in human life and literature. In this blog I will discuss about the work The Tempest by William Shakespeare. This blog is a part of my thinking activity task wich was assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad sir. 

                         The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, probably written in 1610–1611, and thought to be one of the last plays that Shakespeare wrote alone. After the first scene, which takes place on a ship at sea during a tempest, the rest of the story is set on a remote island, where the sorcerer Prospero, a complex and contradictory character, lives with his daughter Miranda, and his two servants—Caliban, a savage monster figure, and Ariel, an airy spirit. The play contains music and songs that evoke the spirit of enchantment on the island. It explores many themes, including magic, betrayal, revenge, and family. In Act IV, a wedding masque serves as a play-within-the play, and contributes spectacle, allegory, and elevated language.

💠 The Tempest as a post-colonial play :-

                              This play can be interpreted in post-colonial perspectives. The plot is based in an island and the description of it seems more significant of colonies, which were being colonized during the time, the play was written. This play reveals how the  colonizers captured the land of the natives and how they controlled the native people, their traditions and culture. Here we find that Prospero is the most powerful protagonist of the play. Prospero's character, actions, reasoning and the way he deals with the inhabitants reflects the attitude of the colonizer. According to the critics,  Prospero reflects the character of a colonizer.

I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour 

 One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage, 

 Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like

 Athing most brutish, I endow' d thy purposes

 With words that made them known . (1.ii.17)

                    The following passage states that Prospero's address to Caliban resembles the colonizers attitude of  civilizing the natives.

                        The play ends with Prospero deciding to return to his country along with his daughter. He leaves the island, frees his slaves and enables Caliban to be the inhabitant of the island. At last, Caliban gets the  freedom and the right to claim his island. He gets the freedom to be himself in his native place. This  incident reflects the period when the colonizers returned to their country after Britain gave freedom to its  colonies. Yet the impact of the colonizers and colonialism remains in the lives of natives.

💠 A Tempest by  Aime Cesaire :-

                     A Tempest by Aime Cesaire was originally published in 1969 in French by Editions du Seuil in Paris.  A Tempest is the third play in a trilogy aimed at advancing the tenets of the negritude movement. A Tempest is a postcolonial revision of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and draws heavily on the original play—the cast of characters is, for the most part, the same, and the foundation of the plot follows the same basic premise. Prospero has been exiled and lives on a secluded island, and he drums up a violent storm to drive his daughter’s ship ashore. The island, however, is somewhere in the Caribbean, Ariel is a mulatto slave rather than a sprite, and Caliban is a black slave. 

                     A Tempest focuses on the plight of Ariel and Caliban—the never-ending quest to gain freedom from Prospero and his rule over the island. Ariel, dutiful to Prospero, follows all orders given to him and sincerely believes that Prospero will honor his promise of emancipation. Caliban, on the other hand, slights Prospero at every opportunity: upon entering the first act, Caliban greets Prospero by saying “Uhuru!”, the Swahili word for “freedom.” Prospero complains that Caliban often speaks in his native language which Prospero has forbidden. This prompts Caliban to attempt to claim birthrights to the island, angering Prospero who threatens to whip Caliban. During their argument, Caliban tells Prospero that he no longer wants to be called Caliban, “Call me X. That would be best. Like a man without a name. Or, to be more precise, a man whose name has been stolen.” The allusion to Malcolm X cements the aura of cultural reclamation that serves as the foundational element of A Tempest.

💠Reference :-

• Shakespeare, William. The Tempest . Peacock Books, 2006. Print.

                        

Postcolonial studies

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"No human utterance could be seen as innocent. Any set of words could be analysed to reveal not just an individual but a historical consciousness at work."

                                          ~  Ania Loomba

           The critical analysis of the history, culture, literature, and modes of discourse that are specific to the former colonies of England, Spain, France, and other European imperial powers. These studies have focused especially on the Third World countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean islands, and South America. Some scholars, however, extend the scope of such analyses also to the discourse and cultural productions of such countries as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, which achieved independence much earlier than the Third World countries. Postcolonial studies sometimes encompass also aspects of British literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, viewed through a perspective that reveals the extent to which the social and economic life represented in the literature was tacitly underwritten by colonial exploitation. ( A Glossary of Literary Terms by M H Abraham)

                     Postcolonial literature is the literature by people from formerly colonized countries. It exists on all continents except Antarctica. Postcolonial literature often addresses the problems and consequences of the decolonization of a country, especially questions relating to the political and cultural independence of formerly subjugated people, and themes such as racialism and colonialism. A range of literary theory has evolved around the subject. It addresses the role of literature in perpetuating and challenging what postcolonial critic Edward Said refers to as cultural imperialism.