The Great Gatsby

 Hello Everyone, I'm a student of the Department of English,M.K.B.U. This blog is assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad as a thinking activity. This blog is based on Scott Fitzgarald's novel 'The Great Gatsby'.

The Great Gatsby

• F. Scott Fitzgerald 

Points to ponder :-

• Introduction

• About the Novelist

• About the novel

• Questions based on this novel

Introduction :-

The Great Gatsby.pptx from DrashtiJoshi21

The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan.The novel was inspired by a youthful romance Fitzgerald had with socialite Ginevra King, and the riotous parties he attended on Long Island's North Shore in 1922.

About the Novelist :-

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age—a term he popularised. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.

 His Notable works :-

• The Beautiful and Damned

• The Great Gatsby

• All the Sad Young Men

• Tender is the Night

About the Novel :-

The Great Gatsby, third novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1925 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Set in Jazz Age New York, the novel tells the tragic story of Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire, and his pursuit of Daisy Buchanan, a wealthy young woman whom he loved in his youth. Unsuccessful upon publication, the book is now considered a classic of American fiction and has often been called the Great American Novel.

The book is narrated by Nick Carraway, a Yale University graduate from the Midwest who moves to New York after World War I to pursue a career in bonds. He recounts the events of the summer he spent in the East two years later, reconstructing his story through a series of flashbacks not always told in chronological order.

Questions based on this novel :-

1) How did the film capture the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, the Flappers & the Prohibition Act of America in the 1920s?

More than any other author, F. Scott Fitzgerald can be said to have captured the rollicking, tumultuous decade known as the Roaring Twenties, from its wild parties, dancing and illegal drinking to its post-war prosperity and its new freedoms for women.

Above all, Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby has been hailed as the quintessential portrait of Jazz Age America, inspiring Hollywood adaptations populated by dashing bootleggers and glamorous flappers in short, fringed dresses.

The Great Gatsby captures the exuberance of the 1920s, it’s ultimately a portrayal of the darker side of the era, and a pointed criticism of the corruption and immorality lurking beneath the glitz and glamour. Fitzgerald’s novel reflects the ways in which that conflict had transformed American society. The war left Europe devastated, and marked the emergence of the United States as the preeminent power in the world. From 1920 to 1929, America enjoyed an economic boom, with a steady rise in income levels, business growth, construction and trading on the stock market.

In The Great Gatsby, both Nick Carraway, the narrator, and Jay Gatsby himself are veterans of World War I, and it is Gatsby’s war service that kicks off his rise from a “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” (in the words of his romantic rival, Tom Buchanan) to the fabulously wealthy owner of a mansion on West Egg, Long Island.

“The only way in which Jay Gatsby becomes wealthy overnight is because Prohibition created a black market,” allowing bootleggers like Gatsby and his partners to amass staggering quantities of money in a short time.In The Great Gatsby, Prohibition finances Gatsby’s rise to a new social status, where he can court his lost love, Daisy Buchanan, whose voice is “full of money.”

By 1925, when Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, flappers were out in full force, complete with bobbed hair, shorter skirts and cigarettes dangling from their mouths as they danced the Charleston. In this novel we find women like Daisy, Jordan and Martial who represent this subculture. 

2) Watch PPT on the difference between the film and the novel and write in brief about it.

1. The plot of the film is pretty much entirely faithful to the novel, but Luhrmann and his co-screenwriter Craig Pearce do cut out one of the side stories: the affair between Nick and Jordan Baker, the friend of Daisy’s from Louisville who is a well-known golfer. Daisy promises to set them up, to push them “accidentally in linen closets and … out to sea in a boat,” a line the screenplay keeps—but then, in the film, the matter is dropped. Luhrmann’s Nick says he found Jordan “frightening” at first, a word Carraway doesn’t apply to her in the novel—and later at Gatsby’s we see Jordan whisked away from Nick by a male companion, which doesn’t happen in the book. In the novel, they become a couple and break up near the end of the summer.

2. The film, like the novel, is a series of set pieces, including an impromptu party that Tom throws in a Manhattan apartment he keeps for his mistress, Myrtle Wilson, wife of a Queens mechanic. Nick accompanies them, and the film shows Nick sitting quietly in the apartment’s living room while the adulterous couple have loud sex in the bedroom. Fitzgerald doesn’t spell out anything so explicit—but something like that is implied: Tom and Myrtle disappear and reappear before the other guests arrive; Nick reads a book and waits. Luhrmann also shows Myrtle’s sister Catherine giving Nick a pill that she says she got from a doctor in Queens; that’s not in the novel at all.

3. In the book, Gatsby takes Nick to lunch at a “well-fanned 42nd Street cellar,” where he introduces his new friend to Meyer Wolfsheim, a Jewish gangster. In the movie, Gatsby and Nick go to a barber shop with a hidden entrance to a speakeasy, and once inside they see not only Wolfsheim but also the police commissioner—who, in the book as in the film, Gatsby was “able to do … a favor once.” They also see there (if I understood things correctly) Nick’s boss, whom I believe Luhrmann has turned into Tom’s friend Walter Chase. (In the novel, those are two different people, neither of whom we ever actually meet.) The speakeasy features entertainment from a bevy of Josephine Baker-like dancers, who are not mentioned in the book.

4. Dan Cody, the rich, drunken yachtsman who first prompts Gatsby on his road to wealth and artifice. In the movie, Cody’s wealth goes to his family.

5. Near the end of the book, Gatsby is murdered by George Wilson, the mechanic husband of Tom’s mistress, who has gotten it into his head that Gatsby killed her—and that, what’s more, he might have been the one she was sleeping with on the side. Fitzgerald doesn’t depict the murder: The book says that Gatsby grabbed a “pneumatic mattress” (i.e., a floater) and headed to his pool, then Gatsby’s chauffeur hears gun shots. Luhrmann ditches the pneumatic mattress and adds his own dramatic flourish. In both book and movie, Gatsby is waiting for a phone call from Daisy, but in the film, Nick calls, and Gatsby gets out of the pool when he hears the phone ring. He’s then shot, and he dies believing that Daisy was going to ditch Tom and go way with him. None of that happens in the book.

3) How did the film help in understanding the symbolic significance of 'The Valley of Ashes', 'The Eyes of Dr. T J . Eckleberg' and 'The Green Light'?

In this novel these three things are symbolically presented.

1. The Valley of Ashes

2. The Eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleberg

3. The Green Light

The Green Light :-

Situated at the end of Daisy’s East Egg dock and barely visible from Gatsby’s West Egg lawn, the green light represents Gatsby’s hopes and dreams for the future. Gatsby associates it with Daisy, and in Chapter 1 he reaches toward it in the darkness as a guiding light to lead him to his goal. Because Gatsby’s quest for Daisy is broadly associated with the American dream, the green light also symbolises that more generalised ideal. In Chapter 9, Nick compares the green light to how America, rising out of the ocean, must have looked to early settlers of the new nation.

The Valley of Ashes :-

First introduced in Chapter 2, the valley of ashes between West Egg and New York City consists of a long stretch of desolate land created by the dumping of industrial ashes. It represents the moral and social decay that results from the uninhibited pursuit of wealth, as the rich indulge themselves with regard for nothing but their own pleasure. The valley of ashes also symbolises the plight of the poor, like George Wilson, who live among the dirty ashes and lose their vitality as a result.

The Eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg :-

The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are a pair of fading, bespectacled eyes painted on an old advertising billboard over the valley of ashes. They may represent God staring down upon and judging American society as a moral wasteland, though the novel never makes this point explicitly. Instead, throughout the novel, Fitzgerald suggests that symbols only have meaning because characters instil them with meaning. The connection between the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg and God exist only in George Wilson’s grief-stricken mind. This lack of concrete significance contributes to the unsettling nature of the image. Thus, the eyes also come to represent the essential meaninglessness of the world and the arbitrariness of the mental process by which people invest objects with meaning. Nick explores these ideas in Chapter 8, when he imagines Gatsby’s final thoughts as a depressed consideration of the emptiness of symbols and dreams.

4) How did the film capture the theme of racism and sexism?

These are the major themes of this novel. 

• Theme of Racism :-

There was a dark side to the American Dream Nick and many others were pursuing during the 1920s. Slavery was ended by the American Civil War of the 1860s, but racism never died. Southern states had strict segregation laws, and blacks were treated as inferior.

The Great Gatsby follows Nick Carraway as he leaves the Midwest and comes to New York City in 1922, an era of loosening morals, jazz and bootlegging. Chasing his own American Dream, Nick ends up living next door to a mysterious, party-throwing millionaire, Jay Gatsby and across the bay from his cousin, Daisy and her husband, Tom Buchanan. Throughout the novel there is a theme of Racism and Anti-Semitism. Racism and Anti-Semitism in the 1920s will greatly influence the ideas of Tom Buchanan and Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby.

• Theme of Sexism :-

Tom is indeed sexist in The Great Gatsby, as is shown through his treatment of Daisy and Myrtle. Tom's disregard for his marriage to Daisy is apparent in his affair with Myrtle, whose death he disregards as an inconvenience.

In Daisy's character also we find this theme, when Daisy meets again Jay and she is introduced with his wealthyness at the time she represents this theme. She loves only the money or wealth of a person,at the first she marries Tom just because of his money and later she seems Jay is more wealthy than Tom ,so she wants to live with him. At this time we find this theme in her character.

5) Watch the video on Nick Carraway and discuss him as a narrator.

The Great Gatsby is written in first-person limited perspective from Nick’s point of view. This means that Nick uses the word “I” and describes events as he experienced them. He does not know what other characters are thinking unless they tell him. Although Nick narrates the book, in many ways he is incidental to the events involved, except that he facilitates the meeting of Daisy and Gatsby. For the most part, he remains an observer of the events around him, disappearing into the background when it comes time to narrate crucial meetings between Gatsby, Tom, and Daisy. In several extended passages his voice disappears completely, and he relates thoughts and feelings of other characters as though he is inside their heads. When Gatsby tells Nick about his past with Daisy, Nick writes directly from Gatsby’s point of view “His heart beat faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl… his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited…” These passages are presented as recollections Gatsby has told Nick, so they don’t violate the first-person narration.

When a story is told from one person’s perspective, the narrator will almost always be unreliable in some way, simply because the narrator brings his or her own biases to bear on the situation. Some narrators deliberately lie to the reader. We call these narrators, or any narrator whose words can largely not be trusted, “unreliable narrators.” Nick Carraway is not a classically unreliable narrator, because Fitzgerald gives no indications that Nick is lying to the reader or that his version of events directly contradicts anyone else’s. He apparently tries to be as truthful as possible. He tells us right away that he has an uncanny ability to reserve judgement and get people to trust him, which encourages us to see him as a reliable narrator. At the same time, he also says “I am one of the few honest people I have ever known.” His very need to describe himself this way makes the reader question how much Nick can actually be trusted.

6) Watch the video on psychoanalytical study of Jay Gatsby and write about his character.

Gatsby’s dreams of winning Daisy for himself end in failure, just as America’s era of prosperity would come to a screeching halt with the stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression. 

Gatsby has great dreams or Goals for his life. He has a shame for his lower-class family background, self-grief , he tries to recapture the lost time , show off his wealth or lavish displays of wealth,and the symbol of the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg ,which represents a God who sees everything. Gatsby tries to recapture the lost time which is impossible to be but he does that and as a result he is being killed by George Wilson, a husband of Martal. His distorted reactions are also represented here phycologically.

 

Word Count :-2493

Images :- 03

Videos :-02

Characteristics of the Comedy of Menace

Characteristics of the Comedy Of Menace :-

Hello Everyone, I'm a student of the Department of English,M.K.B.U. This blog is a part of a thinking activity which is assigned by Yesha Ma'am. In this blog I'm going to write about the characteristics of the Comedy of Menace with the reference of Harold Pinter's one famous work 'The Birthday Party'.

Points To Ponder :-

• Introduction

• About the 20th Century

• Various Types of the Comedy

• About the playwright

• Characteristics of the Comedy of Menace

• 'The Birthday Party' As a Comedy of Menace

• Conclusion 

Introduction :-

The phrase “comedy of menace” as a standalone description inspires both positive and negative feelings. Comedy is used during a dangerous situation to cause audiences to draw judgments about a particular character or communication. The words used are the focus of often powerful stories that create conflicting emotions from its audience. The title “Comedy of Menace” immediately brings contradictions to mind, because comedy is generally something that makes people laugh, and the word "menace" implies something threatening. Quite literally, then, this phrase involves laughing at an ominous situation.

Comedy of menace is the body of plays written by David Campton, Nigel Dennis, N. F. Simpson, and Harold Pinter. The term was coined by drama critic Irving Wardle, who borrowed it from the subtitle of Campton's play The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace, in reviewing Pinter's and Campton's plays in Encore in 1958. (Campton's subtitle Comedy of Menace is a jocular play-on-words derived from comedy of manners—menace being manners pronounced with somewhat of a Judeo-English accent.)

About the 20th Century :-

1. The first two decades of the 20th century were marked by enormous industrial, economic, social, and cultural developments.

2. International trade brought with it increasing growth and prosperity, along with a rise in poverty and slums in major cities. Urbanisation, advances in science and technology, and the spread of goods and information were markers of the times.

3. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, art became heavily influenced by the desire to abstract life and escape the horrific possibilities of the human condition. Artists began to question and play around with themes of reality, perspective, space, and time.

Various Types of the Comedy :-

Definition of Comedy :- Comedy is a literary genre and a type of dramatic work that is amusing and satirical in its tone, mostly having a cheerful ending. The motif of this dramatic work is triumph over unpleasant circumstances by creating comic effects, resulting in a happy or successful conclusion.

There are seven types of comedy which were written during that time. That are like .,

1. Comedy of Humours :-

Comedy of Humours was introduced by Ben Jonson, in English Drama. The Comedy of Humours was the natural expression of his genius.

A form of drama typical at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century; based on the mediaeval and Renaissance belief that people's actions are governed by their dominant bodily humour (blood, phlegm, bile or black bile), its characters are ruled by a particular passion or trait. 

2. Satirical Comedy :-

A form of comedy whose main purpose is to expose the vices and shortcomings of society and of people representing that society.

3. Comedy of Errors :-

An event or series of events made ridiculous by the number of errors that were made throughout

The project was a comedy of errors. In this comedy laughter is evoked by the characters.

e.g., Alexander Pope's Works 

4. Farce :-

A form of low comedy, whose intention is to provoke simple mirth in the form of roars of laughter (and not smiles); it uses exaggerated physical action, character and absurd situation, with improbable events, a complex plot, with events rapidly succeeding one another, pushing character and dialogue into the background.

e.g., Ramesh Maheta(Indian actor, comedian and scriptwriter. He is considered to be the "Charlie Chaplin of Gujarat".)

5. High Comedy and Low Comedy:-

While low comedy is a simple and physically more expressive form, it is also easier to understand and caters to a larger number of readers. High Comedy is a more refined and sophisticated form of comedy.

It appeals on a more intellectual and literary level with heavy usage of witty dialogues, historical and literary references and artistic representations.

 Examples of High comedy would be Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and ,'Indian Bhavai' while low comedy would be , Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe Laurel and Hardy( a British-American comedy duo act during the early Classical Hollywood era of American cinema).

6. Comedy of Manners :-

Depicts a stylish society, mainly the middle and upper classes, its focus is on elegance, with characters of fashion and rank. It satirises the hypocrisy of the society.

e.g., Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest 

7. Comedy of Menace :-

A tragedy with a number of comic elements. A comedy of menace is a play in which the laughter of the audience in some or all situations is immediately followed by a feeling of some impending disaster. The audience is made aware of some menace in the very midst of its laughter. 

e.g.,

• Harold Pinter's ,'The Birthday Party' 

• John Osborne's,'Look Back in Anger' (1956)  (a realist play) 

'Menace' means a threat, danger, risk, intimidate, terrify, and ominous. 

Characteristics of the Comedy of Menace :- 

1. 'O' shape plot is there in this comedy('O' shape plot means first scene is the last scene)

2. Horror things,Day to day life,mostly it is based on the situations of middle class, audience or readers get serious in this comedy

3. Actual violence,threat, absurdity,horror and doubts are at the centre in this comedy 

4. menace is produced throughout the play from potential or actual violence or from an underlying sense of violence throughout the play.

5. The audience feels uncertainty and insecurity throughout the play.

'The Birthday Party' as a Comedy of Menace :-

Harold Pinter was a British playwright whose comedies project the comedy of menace. The comedy of menace literally establishes the outer reality as a force of threatening to the inner space of an individual. The situation and circumstances look absolutely perfect and normal but a kind of unsettling horror and uncomfortable feeling is set beneath the action in the play. Pinter uses his own unique style called Pinteresque which the language and language becomes important as it gives insight into the prevailing situation. The long pauses and gaps actually show the tension and horror of the outside world that the characters seems to be bothered about, reflecting the lack of communication and detachment from outside reality.

The Birthday Party has been described as a comedy of menace because the consistent flow of fear and horror is symbolically presented in the characters mind. Pinter actually exposes the state of modern man and the idea of fear that exists in the human mind. Pinter characters struggle from the fear of society and the criticism of other people. Stanley is such a character who tries to protect himself from the outer society and Pinter’s play often does not give a brief description of the past of characters life.The play is actually the mingling of comedy with a perception of danger that pervades the whole play. Stanley, the central protagonist, always finds his life beset with danger. Meg is the owner of the boarding house away from the society where Stanley stays temporarily as a tenant. Meg arranges a birthday party in Stanley's honour though Stanley denies it being his birthday. Two gentlemen called Mr. Goldberg and Mr. Mc Cann come to stay in the same boarding house for a couple of nights. Their appearance fills Stanley's mind with unexplained fear and tension. Stanley attempts to disturb the strangers so that they will be forced to go away. The feeling of menace is reinforced when Stanley scares Meg by saying that some people would be coming that very day in a van. They would bring a wheelbarrow with them to take someone away. Eventually no one comes but Mr. Goldberg and Mr. Mc Cann take Stanley with them. In fact Goldberg and Mc Cann represent parts of Stanley's own subconscious mind. Nothing is stated or hinted about Goldberg and Mc Cann  and about their attitude towards Stanley. At best they seem to be agents of some organisation which has sent them to track down Stanley.

In this work we can also find an 'O' shape plot. This comedy starts with the serving of food by Mag and at the middle of the play we also find the same scene . We also see the reputation of various scenes , some background voices also we can see in the movie ,which is based on this play, that voices also represent horor,fear ,and doubts. 

Conclusion :-

'The Birthday Party' and 'Look Back in Anger' perfectly reveal the individual and social problems and doubts that Great Britain was moving through during the postwar era. Both these two famous plays indicate the spirit of times and become vehicles or instruments for dramatic action.

Word Count :-1492

Images :- 01

'Tradition and Individual Talent ' by T.S.Eliot

 Tradition and Individual Talent

-T.S.Eliot 

Hello Everyone, I'm a Student of The Department of English,M.K.B.U. This blog is assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad as a Bridge Course. This blog is based on T.S. Eliot's one famous essay 'Tradition and Individual Talent '(1919).

Points to Ponder :-

• Introduction

• About T.S. Eliot

• About the Essay

• Questions based on this essay

• Conclusion

Introduction :-

"Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) is an essay written by poet and literary critic T. S. Eliot. The essay was first published in The Egoist (1919) and later in Eliot's first book of criticism, "The Sacred Wood" (1920). The essay is also available in Eliot's "Selected Prose" and "Selected Essays".

While Eliot is most often known for his poetry, he also contributed to the field of literary criticism. In this dual role, he acted as a cultural critic, comparable to Sir Philip Sidney and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is one of the more well known works that Eliot produced in his critical capacity. It formulates Eliot's influential conception of the relationship between the poet and preceding literary traditions.

About T.S. Eliot :-

T.S. Eliot (Thomas Stearns Eliot) was born September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri. He was educated at Smith Academy in St. Louis (1898–1905); Milton Academy in Massachusetts (1905–1906); Harvard University,University of Paris-Sorbonne and Merton College, Oxford University . He devoted a further year (1915–1916) to a doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of F.H. Bradley, eventually published in 1964.

In 1927, T.S. Eliot became a British citizen. In 1915, he married his first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood (Vivienne Eliot). The marriage was thought to have influenced Eliot’s bleak masterpiece 'The Waste Land' .In 1957, at the age of 68, Eliot married Esmé Valerie Fletcher (Valerie Eliot), his secretary at Faber & Faber since 1950—she was almost 40 years his junior.

The 1948 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, T.S. Eliot is highly distinguished as a poet, a literary critic, a dramatist, an editor, and a publisher. In 1910 and 1911, while still a college student, he wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” published in Poetry magazine, and other poems that are landmarks in the history of modern literature. Eliot’s most notable works include The Waste Land (1922), Four Quartets (1943), and the play Murder in the Cathedral (1935). Eliot’s awards and honours include the British Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature. His play 'The Cocktail Party' won the 1950 Tony Award for Best Play. In 1964, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats was famously adapted in 1981 into 'the musical Cats', which won seven Tony Awards. Despite his enduring popularity, Eliot and his work have been criticised as having prejudiced views, particularly anti-Semitism.

Eliot was almost as renowned a literary critic as he was a poet. From 1916 through 1921, he contributed approximately 100 reviews and articles to various periodicals. He also made significant contributions as an editor and a publisher. From 1922 to 1939, Eliot edited a major journal, 'The Criterion', and from 1925 to 1965, he was an editor and a director in the publishing house of Faber & Faber.

Eliot’s career as a poet can be reasonably organised into three periods—the first coincided with his studies in Boston and Paris, culminating in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock '' in 1911. The second coincided with World War I and the financial and marital stress of his early years in London, culminating in 'The WasteLand' in 1922. The third coincided with Eliot’s angst at the economic depression and the rise of Nazism, culminating in the wartime Four Quartets in 1943. The poems of the first period were preceded by only a few exercises published in school magazines, but in 1910 and 1911, he wrote four poems that introduced themes to which, with variation and development, he returned time and again: “Portrait of a Lady,” “Preludes,” “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”T.S. Eliot died in 1965.

 About the Essay :-

‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ was first published in 1919 in the literary magazine The Egoist. It was published in two parts, in the September and December issues. The essay was written by a young American poet named T. S. Eliot (1888-1965).

‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) sees Eliot defending the role of tradition in helping new writers to be modern. This is one of the central paradoxes of Eliot’s writing – indeed, of much modernism – that in order to move forward it often looks to the past, even more directly and more pointedly than previous poets had.

This theory of tradition also highlights Eliot’s anti-Romanticism. Unlike the Romantics’ idea of original creation and inspiration, Eliot’s concept of tradition foregrounds how important older writers are to contemporary writers: Homer and Dante are Eliot’s contemporaries because they inform his work as much as those alive in the twentieth century do.

Video based on this :-

Questions based on this essay :-

1). How would you like to explain Eliot's concept of Tradition? Do you agree with it?

The concept of 'Tradition' begins with the dictionary meaning of the word 'Tradition'.

 

Dictionary meaning of Tradition :-At a particular place,over a period of time people live a life believing in surtain principal beliefs and carry out a way of life. One can see certain aspects of being negative and certain aspects of being positive.

According to T.S.Eliot 'Tradition' is not just following and imitating the dogmas or the customs  of a given culture and tradition,it is much more than that'. Tradition is a larger term for him. He does not believe in slavish imitation of the tradition. He also describes modern critics point of views and says that according to them tradition means traditional. 

For Eliot, Tradition has a three-fold significance. Firstly, tradition cannot be inherited and involves a great deal of labour and erudition. Secondly, it involves the historical sense which involves apperception not only of the pastness of the past, but also of its presence. Thirdly, the historical sense enables a writer to write not only with his own generation in mind, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature from Homer down to the literature of his own country forms a continuous literary tradition. He takes tradition in a very positive way and that we can find in his works. 

"Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour". 

Eliot  compares different traditions with The country Europe , he says that Europe is divided into two or three parts after the world war and he says each nation has a history of their own generation, the same as traditions of different religions and cultures are differentiated from each other because traditions also change with the time . 

I agree with Eliot's concept of tradition because he takes tradition in a very positive way, each and every person follows tradition in their life. Like language we got the tradition from our parents and family , so we have a deep affection towards our traditions and sometimes we follow tradition by forces of our religion and culture . I also believe that tradition is good in certain things but we should not follow it blindly. 

2. What do you understand by Historical Sense? (Use these quotes to explain your understanding)

• "The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence"
• "This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional."

According to Eliot, all writers must have all the Literature's knowledge they want to write. The writer should write with the history in his bones.

He says that historical sence or knowledge is most important for the writers because they are going to write a literature and if they have the historical knowledge they can write better one. They can clear the mistakes in the earlier works and produce new works .

History sense or knowledge is most important not only for the writers but each and every person because, if they have the knowledge of their past then they can introduce the situations and also get the ideas how to live a life and what are the mistakes they should not do in their life. If they have knowledge about the past they can clear the mistakes and live their life happily.

• "The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence"

This quote suggests how historical sense helps us to live life . The word pastness means tradition lives in the present. Through this quote the writer says that our tradition always lives with us,it is not our past but it is our present.

For Example :-

'Mahabharata' is one of our holy books, it is based on the 'Kauravas and Pandavas' story. This story tells our religious history. On the other hand it is the story of our past but in our contemporary time we also find characters similar to this book. So, we can say that historical sence or knowledge is all about the past but it is our present also and if we have the knowledge about that then we can easily survive in these situations.

• "This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional."

In this quote Eliot describes how history is connected with our present. How history is repeatedly repits in our life. The word 'temporal',means does not have any past, and 'Temporal' means it exists even today.

As history does not describe the exact time but through the story it can be described. As per our history or the story of our holy books we can get the idea how that story lives in our day-to-day life. So, we can find the same history of our life as well as in our history. 

3. Explain: " Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality."

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. 

Through this quote writers suggest that in poetry or other writings personality of a writer is not that important as much as poetry. Mostly writers write their work to escape from reality and to go into their imaginative world. In their writings writers try to express their feelings and emotions towards the society. In the writings poets or writers are not a part of this but their writings are most important. Writers write their works to escape from life and live in their imaginative world. 

For Example :-

S. T. Coleridge (a romantic poet), writes his poems just because he wants to escape from their family and he wants to express his feelings and emotions toward the world. 

 

Conclusion :-

Finally Eliot ends his essay with, Very few know when there is expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead,but al vist is already long.

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