Friday, June 21, 2013
Thursday, June 13, 2013
Tuesday, June 4, 2013
Giving voice to the voiceless
Giving voice to the voiceless
In his Ramon Magsaysay Award acceptance speech in Manila on August 31, P. Sainath, Rural Affairs Editor of The Hindu, spoke of the legacy bequeathed to Indian journalism by freedom fighters who doubled up as journalists, and said he w as accepting the award on behalf of the same tradition of giving voice to the voiceless.
Mr. Sainath won the award in the Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication category for his “passionate commitment as a journalist to restore the rural poor to India’s national consciouness.”
This is the text of the speech:
This is the 60th year of Indian independence. A freedom fought for and won on a vision that placed our humblest citizens at the centre of action and of the future. A struggle that brought the world’s then mightiest empire to its knees. A struggle which saw the birth of a new nation, with a populace overwhelmingly illiterate, yet aiming at and committed to building a democracy the world could be proud of. A people who, one freedom fighter predicted, would make the deaf hear and the blind see. They did.
Today, the generation of Indians who took part in that great struggle have mostly died out, though their achievements have not. The few who remain are in their late 80s or 90s. As one of them told me recently: “We fought to expel the colonial ruler, but not only for that. We fought for a just and honourable nation, for a good society.”
I am now recording the lives of these last stalwarts of a generation I was not part of, but which I so deeply admire. A struggle that preceded my birth, but in which my own values are rooted. In their names, with those principles, and for their selflessness, I accept this great award.
In that great battle for freedom, a tiny press played a mighty role. So vital did it become, that every national leader worth his or her salt, across the political spectrum, also doubled up as a journalist. Small and vulnerable as they were, the journalists of that time also sought to give voice to the voiceless and speak for those who could not. Their rewards were banning, imprisonment, exile and worse. But they bequeathed to Indian journalism a legacy I am proud of and on behalf of which tradition, I accept this award today.
For the vision that generation stood for, the values it embodied, are no longer so secure as they once were. A nation founded on principles of egalitarianism embedded in its Constitution, now witnesses the growth of inequality on a scale not seen since the days of the Colonial Raj. A nation that ranks fourth in the world’s list of dollar billionaires, ranks 126th in human development. A crisis in the countryside has seen agriculture — on which close to 60 per cent of the population, or over 600 million people, depend — descend into the doldrums. It has seen rural employment crash. It has driven hundreds of thousands from villages towards towns and cities in search of jobs that are not there. It has pushed millions deeper into debt and has seen, according to the government itself, over 112,000 farmers take their own lives in distress in a decade.
This time around, though, the response of a media politically free but chained by profit, has not been anywhere as inspiring. Front pages and prime time are the turf of film stars, fashion shows and the entrenched privilege of the elite. Rural India, where the greatest battles of our freedom were fought, is pretty low down in the media’s priority list. There are, as always, exceptions. The paper I work for, The Hindu, has consistently given space to the chronicling of o ur greatest agrarian crisis since the eve of the Green Revolution. And across the country are countless journalists who, despite active discouragement from their managements, seek to place people above profit in their reporting. Who try desperately to warn their audiences of what is going on at the bottom end of the spectrum and the dangers to democracy that this involves. On behalf of all of them, all these colleagues of mine, I accept this award.
In nearly 14 years of reporting India’s villages full time, I have felt honoured and humbled by the generosity of some of the poorest people in the world. People who constantly bring home to you the Mahatma’s great line: ‘Live simply, that others might simply live.’ But a people we today sideline and marginalise in the path of development we now pursue. A people in distress, even despair, who still manage to awe me with their human and humane values. On their behalf too, I accept the Ramon Magsaysay award.
source: The Hindu
In his Ramon Magsaysay Award acceptance speech in Manila on August 31, P. Sainath, Rural Affairs Editor of The Hindu, spoke of the legacy bequeathed to Indian journalism by freedom fighters who doubled up as journalists, and said he w as accepting the award on behalf of the same tradition of giving voice to the voiceless.
Mr. Sainath won the award in the Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication category for his “passionate commitment as a journalist to restore the rural poor to India’s national consciouness.”
This is the text of the speech:
This is the 60th year of Indian independence. A freedom fought for and won on a vision that placed our humblest citizens at the centre of action and of the future. A struggle that brought the world’s then mightiest empire to its knees. A struggle which saw the birth of a new nation, with a populace overwhelmingly illiterate, yet aiming at and committed to building a democracy the world could be proud of. A people who, one freedom fighter predicted, would make the deaf hear and the blind see. They did.
Today, the generation of Indians who took part in that great struggle have mostly died out, though their achievements have not. The few who remain are in their late 80s or 90s. As one of them told me recently: “We fought to expel the colonial ruler, but not only for that. We fought for a just and honourable nation, for a good society.”
I am now recording the lives of these last stalwarts of a generation I was not part of, but which I so deeply admire. A struggle that preceded my birth, but in which my own values are rooted. In their names, with those principles, and for their selflessness, I accept this great award.
In that great battle for freedom, a tiny press played a mighty role. So vital did it become, that every national leader worth his or her salt, across the political spectrum, also doubled up as a journalist. Small and vulnerable as they were, the journalists of that time also sought to give voice to the voiceless and speak for those who could not. Their rewards were banning, imprisonment, exile and worse. But they bequeathed to Indian journalism a legacy I am proud of and on behalf of which tradition, I accept this award today.
For the vision that generation stood for, the values it embodied, are no longer so secure as they once were. A nation founded on principles of egalitarianism embedded in its Constitution, now witnesses the growth of inequality on a scale not seen since the days of the Colonial Raj. A nation that ranks fourth in the world’s list of dollar billionaires, ranks 126th in human development. A crisis in the countryside has seen agriculture — on which close to 60 per cent of the population, or over 600 million people, depend — descend into the doldrums. It has seen rural employment crash. It has driven hundreds of thousands from villages towards towns and cities in search of jobs that are not there. It has pushed millions deeper into debt and has seen, according to the government itself, over 112,000 farmers take their own lives in distress in a decade.
This time around, though, the response of a media politically free but chained by profit, has not been anywhere as inspiring. Front pages and prime time are the turf of film stars, fashion shows and the entrenched privilege of the elite. Rural India, where the greatest battles of our freedom were fought, is pretty low down in the media’s priority list. There are, as always, exceptions. The paper I work for, The Hindu, has consistently given space to the chronicling of o ur greatest agrarian crisis since the eve of the Green Revolution. And across the country are countless journalists who, despite active discouragement from their managements, seek to place people above profit in their reporting. Who try desperately to warn their audiences of what is going on at the bottom end of the spectrum and the dangers to democracy that this involves. On behalf of all of them, all these colleagues of mine, I accept this award.
In nearly 14 years of reporting India’s villages full time, I have felt honoured and humbled by the generosity of some of the poorest people in the world. People who constantly bring home to you the Mahatma’s great line: ‘Live simply, that others might simply live.’ But a people we today sideline and marginalise in the path of development we now pursue. A people in distress, even despair, who still manage to awe me with their human and humane values. On their behalf too, I accept the Ramon Magsaysay award.
source: The Hindu
Eminent journalist Palagummi Sainath on Friday received the 2007 Ramon Magsaysay award for journalism, literature and creative communication arts in recognition of his commitment as a journalist to restore the rural poor to India's consciousness.
The award, comprising a certificate, medallion and cash prize of $50,000, was conferred to him at a ceremony in Philippines capital Manila by the country's Chief Justice, Artemo Panganiban.
This is not the first time that Sainath has been honoured for his notable work, focusing on pressing issues of rural development.He was the first journalist to win Amnesty International's Global Human Rights Journalism prize in its inaugural year in 2000. He also received the A H Boerma Award in 2001 and 2003-04 Prem Bhatia Award for excellence in political reporting and analysis.The author of the highly-acclaimed Everybody Loves a Good Drought was once referred to by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen as 'one of the world's great experts on famine and hunger.' (rediff.com)
The award, comprising a certificate, medallion and cash prize of $50,000, was conferred to him at a ceremony in Philippines capital Manila by the country's Chief Justice, Artemo Panganiban.
This is not the first time that Sainath has been honoured for his notable work, focusing on pressing issues of rural development.He was the first journalist to win Amnesty International's Global Human Rights Journalism prize in its inaugural year in 2000. He also received the A H Boerma Award in 2001 and 2003-04 Prem Bhatia Award for excellence in political reporting and analysis.The author of the highly-acclaimed Everybody Loves a Good Drought was once referred to by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen as 'one of the world's great experts on famine and hunger.' (rediff.com)
India’s Best Colleges | 10 mass communication institutes in India
Aim for at least seven to nine small servings of fruits and vegetables a day.
-----------
beautiful Thailand
house
Horse
sky
Waterfall
Shark
--------
Flower
=======================
India’s Best Colleges | 10 mass communication institutes in India
Ahmedabad: Small is beautiful. At least that’s what seems to be working for the two best-ranked mass communication institutes in the country.
The Mudra Institute of Communications in Ahmedabad (MICA) is the best mass communication institute to study in the country. It is closely followed by Asian College of Journalism, or ACJ, Chennai.
Click here to view top 10 mass communication institutes
Amid a media boom and a frenzy to hire journalists across multiple media—print, online, television—employers have been increasingly witnessing a dearth of employable talent, despite about 200 colleges who offer journalism programmes recognized by the University Grants Commission.
According to a report by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Ficci), an industry lobby, India’s print and broadcast industries are expected to grow at a compounded annual rate of 14% and 22%, respectively, until 2012. While print is estimated to become a Rs28,100 crore industry by 2012, television will be a Rs60,000 crore sector.
The schools say that their size works in their favour. For example, MICA has approval for intake of 120 students in its course on communication management. It has also started a one-year postgraduate programme for professionals with prior experience with a batch of up to 25 students, and runs a six-month crafting creative communications programme, again with a maximum of 25 students.
“So for a student strength of 170, our faculty strength is 37. We equip our students to find their own solutions to problems and not tell them what the solutions are. Small size helps us give proper attention,” said Naval K. Bhargava, dean, international relations, MICA.
Sashi Kumar, chairman of ACJ, too maintains that being small helps. ACJ has a policy of having one faculty member for 12 students. Though ACJ can admit 120 students, Sashi Kumar says it does not take more than 115 students. Permanent faculty strength is 13, with 25 visiting faculty. “Journalism is not about lectures but about intellectual training. We deal in ideas, so keeping small size of student batch helps,” he adds.
Having a smaller batch size also helps in better communication and brings in openness. “I liked the ethos of MICA and the promotion of free thinking. There is something very creative and dynamic about the place. There is a real sense of excitement in learning and the tutors are exceptional in bringing their zeal and interest to the students. Amazing infrastructure, facilities and coursework makes MICA stand out from other institutes,” says Megha Vadodaria, MICA alumna of 2005, who plans to go to the UK for further studies. She is currently working with her own media house, Sambhaav Group of Publications, in Gujarat.
The other trait that has helped these institutes maintain edge is keeping their curriculum in sync with times. “We are very focused on the needs of the market and the industry. We make students better equipped with what a consumer is likely to think and demand. Our students understand the consumers, their sociology, culture, socio-economic aspects. All sounds simple when you see the net results, but it is not so in reality,” Bhargav said.
For its part, ACJ is now working to teaching students the nuances of working in a fast-changing media sector, and also to better leverage technology. “Today people talk of podcasting, convergence, IP TV. What was taught to students in 2001 or even 2007 would be different from what they would learn in 2008 or 2009,” Sashi Kumar said.
Though both teach students to use mass media to reach their target audience and do not challenge the ratings, surprisingly, they both desist from calling themselves mass communication institutes. “We are allergic to the word ‘communication,’ as it has been abused by many university colleges in the past. We are more of a journalism institute,” Sashi Kumar said.
It is a view shared by alumnus and deputy news editor at business television channel CNBC , Harsha Subramaniam. ”I feel it is not right to call ACJ a mass communication institute as it is purely a journalism school. I feel mass communication institutes also teach advertising, public relations, corporate communications as part of their curricula,” he adds.
The MICA director, international relations, too feels that MICA is more of a communication management institute, linking them to Indian Institute of Management (IIMs). “We basically teach management with communications management at the heart. The only difference is that our subjects are different than other management schools and media is only one part of our curriculum,” he adds.
And how are these institutes looking to the future? MICA is already in talks with an international university to provide a dual degree course to its students in the future. ACJ has been receiving a lot of requests for a similar institute in North India and in the West Asia. Both are exploring these options, even as they churn out small and intimate batches on the domestic front.
source: livemint
How to succeed in journalism ...
How to succeed in journalism ...
Snapshot:-
In India there are about 4,720 newspapers, 400 TV channels. Andhra Pradesh has highest number of Television news channels in South India. 13 channels out of 36 TV channels in AP are news channels. 12 channels are entertainment channels
Telugu TV channels
Music – 2
Children – 3
Women -1
Spiritual – 5
News – 13
Entertainment 12
Total 36
'All Facebook' Blogger Explains Reporting Process, Decision to Unpublish Erroneous Post
Reinventing the newspaper
10 hella funny videos about journalism you must see
Truth about fiction
http://www.multimediashooter.com/wp/tipstricks/10-hella-funny-videos-about-journalism-you-must-see/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Multimediashooter+(MultimediaShooter)
Media Matters: Print Journalism Glossary
Advance: statement or speech issued in advance to the media.
Advertorial: where distinction between editorial and advertising become blurred.
Agency: main news agencies.
Agony aunt: woman offering advice to people who write to newspapers with personal or emotional problems. Agony uncle is the male equivalent, but not many of these around.
Alternative press: loose term incorporating wide variety of non-mainstream newspapers. Can include leftist, religious, municipal, trade-union publications.
Ampersand: character (&) representing the word ‘and’
Anchor piece: story placed across the bottom of a page.
Angle: main point stressed in story usually in intro. Also known as hook. US: peg
Anti-aliasing: process to smooth the edges of digital pictures to minimize pixilation.
Ascender: upright in the letters b,d,f,h,k,l
Attribution: linking information or quote to original source.
Backbench: group of top-level journalists who meet to decide the overall shape and emphases in newspaper.
Background: section of news or feature story carrying information which serves to contextualize main elements. Also in computer jargon, indicates hyphenation and justification system is operating while copy is being input
Backgrounder: feature exploring the background to main story in the news.
Bleed: picture printed beyo0nd the area to be trimmed on page.
Blogspeak: esoteric jargon of blogs.
Blurb: words describing a story within the paper or magazine.
Body: copy following intro
Bold: more heavily defined version of a roman font.
Broadsheet: large format newspaper in which four pages fit across the width of the press; usually considered to be of a more serious quality than a tabloid.
Browser: software program for navigating the Internet, in particular the world wide web
Byline: gives name of journalist who has written article. Otherwise known as credit line.
Subs sometimes call it blame line. When appears at end of story known as sign-off.
Calls, check calls: routine telephone calls (or sometimes face to face visits) by reporters to bodies such as police, ambulance, hospitals, fire brigade(usually supplying information on tapes) to check if any news is breaking.
Campaigning journalism: overtly partisan journalism promoting particular cause. US: advocacy journalism.
Caps: upper-case letters
Caption: words accompanying picture or graphic.
Casting off: estimating the length of copy.
Causal: journalist employed by newspaper/magazine on a temporary basis. Since it is cheaper fro employers, numbers are growing.
Catchline: usually single word identifying story which is typed in right-hand corner of every page. Now more likely to be called the filename. Sub-editor will tend to use this word to identify story on layout. US: slug
CMYK: colours of ink used for four-colour printing: cyan, magenta, yellow and black.
Colour: section of newspaper copy focusing on descriptions or impressions. Thus a colour feature is one which puts emphasis on description and the subjective response of the journalist though the news element may still be strong.
Column: vertical section of article appearing on page. Also known as leg
Compact: tabloid version of former broadsheet newspaper e.g. The Times
Condensed: a version of a font that has been squeezed horizontally.
Conference meeting of editorial staff to discuss previous issues and plan future ones.
Contact: journalist’s source
Contacts book: pocket-sized booklet carried by reporter listing contact details of sources.
Copy: editorial material. Hard copy refers to editorial material typed on paper
Copy approval: person allowed to see and approve copy before publication.
Credit: byline of photographer or illustrator
Crop: to select an area of a picture for publication.
Cross head: a heading placed within the body of a story
Cut-outs: when elements of a picture are cut away from the background (a simple device using an image editing program such as Photoshop).
Cuttings: stories cut from newspapers or magazines; cuttings job is an article based on cuttings; also known as clips or clippings
Database: storage of electronically accessible data.
Dateline: place from which story was filed usually applied to stories from abroad.
Day in the life of profile: feature focusing on particular day of subject. Not to be confused with life in the day of profile, which covers subject’s life but in context of talking about currently typical day.
Deadline: time by which copy is expected to be submitted.
Death knock: when a journalist breaks news of a death to a member of the public.
Deck: often used to mean the number of lines in a heading is, strictly, the number of heading.
Delete: to cut or remove
Demographics specific characteristics
Descenders: the portion of a letter that descends below the x-height in the following: g, p, q, j, y.
Desks: departments of newspapers: thus news desk, features desk.
Diary: day by day listing of events to cover
Diary column: gossip column, also a day-to-day personal account
Diary piece: article derived from routine sources (press conferences, press releases, council meetings, parliament) listed in diary (originally in written form but increasingly on screens) which helps news desk organize news-gathering activities. Off-diary stories come from reporters’ initiative and from non-routine sources
Dig: to do deep research
Direct entry: entry to journalism through publication which runs its own training programme.
Display ads: large advertisements usually containing illustrations and appearing on editorial pages. Advertising department will organize distribution of ads throughout the newspaper which is usually indicated on a dummy handed to subs before layout begins.
Doorstepping: journalists pursuing sources by standing outside their front doors. Now journalists often wait in cars
Dots per inch: a way of measuring printing and scanning resolution.
Double page spread: facing pages used for the same story.
Downpage: story appearing in bottom half of newspaper page.
Downtable: subs other than the chief and deputy chief subs (who often used to sit at the top table of the subs room)
Drop letter: (also drop cap) printed version of the illuminated letters that started hand-scribed bibles and other manuscripts. The letter is large enough to run alongside two or three lines of text.
Drudge report: US gossip web site run by Matt Drudge which controversially first exposed the President Clinton / Monica Lewinsky scandal in January 1998.
Dumbing-down: claim that media standards, in general, are falling with increasing emphasis on sensationalism, celebrities, human interest stories, sexual titillation, scandal and sleaze.
Dummy: newspaper mock-up to track the placing of adverts.
Edition: specific version of a publication. Editions can be published for a specific day or a specific time of day or place.
Editoinalising: publishing more than one edition on any day to take in breaking news.
Ellipse: three dots (…) usually indicating a pause or that some copy is missing
Em: the square of the body height of the typesize
Embargo: time (often found on press release) before which information should not be published
Em-dash: a dash the size of an em
Em-squad: the square of the body type. Usually assumed to be a pica-em or a 12pt.
En: half an em
Entry point: the place the page designer intends to draw the reader to on starting the page
EPS: encapsulated postscript: a digital graphics format
Exclusive: story supposedly unique carried by newspaper. System becomes devalued when attached to stories too frequently or when the same story is carried in other newspapers (as often happens)
Expanded: a version of a font that has been expanded horizontally.
Eyewitness reporting: presence of reporter at news even can provide unique opportunities for descriptive writing.
Face: typeface
Fact box: listing of facts (often boxed) relating to story. Useful way of creating visual and copy variety on page
Feature: as distinct form news story, tends to be longer, carry more background information, colour, wider range of sources and journalist’s opinion can be prominent.
Filler: short story, usually of one or two pars, filling in space when a longer story runs short (also known as brief)
Fireman: person sent from newspaper’s headquarters to cover major story (either at home or abroad).
Flat plan: plan of publication showing all pages
Font: family of type characters.
Footer: bottom margin area of the page often used to insert the publication, title, date or page number
Full out: when text occupies the full measure of the column
Full point: full stop
Generalist: non-specialist reporter. News teams tend to be mixes of generalists and specialists.
Gonzo journalism: a highly subjective genre of journalism, some times drug induced, pioneered by the American, Thompson in the 1960s and 1970s
Gutter: space between pages.
Half-tone: any rasterised picture where shades of grey are represented by different sized dots.
Handout: story sent to media outlets by press relations office of organization or PR company.
Hanging indent: the first line of a paragraph is full out while the rest is indented, usually by one em.
Hard copy: copy typed on sheets of paper. Each page is known as folio.
Hard news: news focusing on who, what, where, when, why based on factual detail and quotes and containing little description, journalist comment or analysis
Heavies: broadsheet serious papers such as Guardian
House: media organization
Human interest story: story focusing on success, failures, tragedies, emotional or sexual histories of people, eliminating or marginalizing more abstract and deeper cultural, economic, political, class-based factors.
Imprint: the printer’s and publisher’s details. Required by law.
Indent: small space at start of line.
Intro: opening of news or feature story usually containing main angle. Not necessarily just single par. Also known as lead. US: nose
Inverted pyramid: traditional representation of news stories (with main point at start and information declining in news value thereafter and ending with short background). Tends to oversimplify structure of news story. Better to imagine series of inverted pyramids within an overall large pyramid.
Investigative reporting: in one respect all journalism involves investigation. But investigative journalism tends to reveal something of social or political significance which someone powerful or famous wants hidden. US: muckraking.
Issue: all copies of the day’s paper and its editions.
Justification: a way of setting type to ensure that all lines on both sides of the block of text are level.
Lead: pronounced ‘led’. The space between lines which is additional to the size of the body type. So called because it was originally strips of metal (lead) which spaced out lines of type.
Lead: pronounced ‘leed’. The main story on the page. Could also mean the story’s intro.
Leader: the editorial comment.
Leaders: line of dots, dashes or other devices to lead the eye across the page especially in a table.
Leading: pronounced ‘ledding’: as ‘lead’ above but also used to mean the actual space (as opposed to the body type) in which the type lives.
Letterpress: printing method that presses raised inked type against paper.
Lexia: small fragments of text.
Life: to use whole or section of story from one edition to the next; also to pinch story from other media outlet changing and adding only a little. When barest minimum is changed known as straight lift.
Linage: payment to freelances based on number of lines of copy used.
Listings: lists usually of entertainment events giving basic information: times, venue, phone numbers and so on.
Lithography: printing method that relies on the inability of oily ink and water to mix.
Lobby: specialist group of correspondents reporting on the House of commons.
Masthead: papers title piece.
Measure: width of a block of text measured in 12 pt ems.
Mutton: slang name for an em
Narrowcasting: targeting publication to specific groups of people such as property owners or clubbers.
Negs: photographic negatives
Nibs: short news stories
Nut: slang name for an en
Off the record: when statements are made not for publication but for background only. Information derived from comments should in no way be traceable back to source.
Off-beat: unusual story often with a humorous twist.
On spec: uncommissioned article submitted voluntarily to media
On the record: when there are no restrictions on reporting what is said.
Op ed: abbreviation of opposite editorial, being the page opposite one on which editorial/leader comment falls. Usually contains important features and commentary by prestigious columnists.
Opinion piece: article in which journalist express overt opinion.
Orphan: short lien left at foot of column.
Outro: final section of a feature.
Pagination: arrangement and number of pages in publication
Par, Para: abbreviation of paragraph
Patch: geographic area of special interest.
Pay-off last par with twist or flourish.
Pica: old name for 12 pt
Pick up: journalist attending function might pick up or take away a photograph supplied by the organizers, known as a pick-up job; also journalists following up an event after it has happened is picking up news.
Pierce: cutting a shape into a picture to insert type or another picture.
Pitching: proposing story idea to newspaper/magazine
Pix: journalese for pictures / photographs (singular: pic)
Point: unit of typographical measurement.
Pool: privileged, small group of journalists with special access to event or source. Their reports and findings are distributed to those news organizations outside the pool.
Popbitch: http://www.popbitch.com/ web site focusing on satirical celebrity gossip.
Pops/populars: mass-selling national tabloids; now known as red-tops because their mastheads are in red.
Press release: announcement made by organization specially for use by media (not necessarily just press)
Profile: picture in words which usually focuses on an individual but organization, cars, horses, a building, and so on can be profiled.
Puff: advert for editorial changes/corrections on draft copy of text/graphic
Pull quote: short extract from news or feature set in larger type as part of page design.
Punchline: main point of story. Thus ‘punchy’ means story has a strong news angle.
Raster dot: dot of ink in a screened picture that allows shades of grey to be represented with black ink.
Renose: to change the angle of a story
Replate: unplanned change of plate on the press to produce a new page to include urgent news or correct a major mistake.
Ring-around: story based on series of telephone calls
Round-up: gathering together of various strands of story either under the same heading (otherwise known as umbrella story) or under variety of headings.
RSI: repetitive strain injury which journalists can suffer through their use of a keyboard and mouse
Rule: a straight line
Run: period of printing edition.
Scoop: exclusive
Sexy story: story with popular appeal. But many sexy stories give sex a bad name.
Sidebars: short stories printed alongside longer article providing additional, contrasting or late-breaking items.
Sign-off: byline at foot of story
Silly season: supposedly a time (usually in the summer holiday period) when little hard news is around and the press is reduced to covering trivia. For some newspapers silly season can last a long time. Wars and invasions often happen in silly seasons, too.
Sketch: light, often witty article describing event. Most commonly used with reference to reporting House of Commons
Slip: special edition for particular area or event.
Snap: brief information given by news agency before main story is sent.
Snapper: photographer
Soft news: light news story that can be more colourful, witty and commenty than hard news.
Soundbite: short, pithy quote used by journalists. First coined by US radio and television journalists in the late 1960s.
Spike: to reject copy or other information (e.g. press release). Derived from old metal spike which stood on wooden base on which subs would stick unwanted material. Had advantage over binning since material was accessible so long as it remained on spike.
Spin doctors: people who attempt to influence news or political agenda (the ‘spin’ in the jargon) such as press officers, communications specialists and other propagandists.
Splash: lead news story on front page
Spot colour: additional colour added to a black and white publication.
Standfirst: text intended to be read between headline and story which can elaborate on point made in headline, add new one or raise questions which will be answered in story (a teaser). Sometimes contains byline. Helps provide reader with a guiding hand into reading large slice of copy- thus mainly used for features and occasionally long news stories. Also known as the ‘sell’
Strapline: heading placed over another heading or headings.
Streamer: heading covering the full width of the page.
Stringer: freelance, in provinces, in London or overseas, who has come to arrangement with news organization to supply copy on agreed basis. Superstringer will contract to devote most of working for one organization but still be free to freelance for other media outlets for rest of time.
Style: special rules adopted by newspaper relating to spellings, punctuation and abbreviation. Often contained within style book though increasingly carried on screen. Many newspapers somehow survive without them.
Tabloid: newspaper whose pages are roughly half the size of broadsheet. All pops or popular papers are tabloids as are sections of some of the heavies. Serious tabloids exist in France and in the USA (Los Angeles times)
Taxonomy: breakdown of an issue into groups, categories or listing.
Teaser: a headline which only hints at the main angle of the story
Template: page on the computer screen providing a basic design pattern.
Think piece: analytical article.
Tip-off: information supplied to media by member of the public.
Titlepiece: publication’s name and logo
Tots abbreviation for triumph over tragedy story, particularly popular human interest genre.
Trim: cut a report
URL: uniform resource location: a string of characters identifying internet resource
Whistleblower: person revealing newsworthy and previously secret information to media.
Zeitgeist: spirit of the age
****
Nepal votes in historic polls
Nearly 67 per cent of voters exercised their franchise in the historic Constituent Assembly elections in Nepal on Thursday amid sporadic incidents of violence, which claimed the life of a Nepali Congress cadre.
According to the preliminary information of the Election Commission, more than 60 to 67 per cent people exercised their franchise in Thursday's election.
The elections were also postponed in few constituencies.
Voting has been postponed in around two dozen polling centres due to the clashes between the party cadres.
Election was held peacefully compared to the previous elections, officials said. This is the first time that the CA polls were held after the Maoists came to the peace process couple of years ago.
Election was held for the first time to write a new Constitution and decide the future of the 240-year monarchy in Nepal.
Polling started at 0700 hours (0645 IST) and ended at 1700 hours (1645 IST), election officials said. Some 6,000 candidates are contesting the election under proportionate voting system while 4,021 candidates are in the fray under direct voting system.
Altogether 55 political parties are participated in the crucial polls in which some 17.6 million people were eligible to vote.
The country has witnessed a violence-marred campaign for the crucial elections.
The vote is a key step towards culmination of the peace process that started with the signing of a November 2006 deal following which the Maoist rebels ended their decade-long insurgency and joined the political mainstream.
The common agenda of the ruling Seven Party Alliance for the election is to abolish monarchy and establish a federal democratic republic.
***
Raghu Rai's journey began with a borrowed Agfa Super Silette. He captured his first frame, a donkey, on the outskirts of Delhi in 1965. The black and white picture was picked up by The Times, and, thus began Rai's romance with photography.
Journey of a Moment in Time at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi has vignettes from Rai's 40 years of photography. About the journey so far, he says: "My work involved composing powerful photo editorials. Unlike today's media that is mostly infotainment, our work had a serious purpose to it."
Rai has no explanation for his ability to mesmerise the observer. "It is difficult to describe my work. Basically, the title of my show has a lot to say-capturing a moment. For me, it has been the journey of the moment all these years. So people of different age groups and backgrounds relate to them in some way or the other," he says.
Says Union Minister for Tourism and Culture Ambika Soni, who inaugurated the show in Delhi: "Whenever I see his work, I feel the photographs are on hold. The moment you press a button, they would come alive." Rai's show which is on in Delhi till April 15, will move to Mumbai on May 6.
Although he worked exclusively in black and white during the first two decades of his career, Rai is now trying other mediums. "The emotional aspect of a situation is most important, medium comes next," he says.
An image from 1984 haunts you long after you leave the place. It shows a hand caressing a little face whose staring eyes are filmed with dust. "On the morning after the Bhopal gas tragedy, I found a man burying his daughter with his bare hands," says Rai. "He had covered the body with soil, but wanted to see her face for the last time."
****
Monzon ridden by Colin Bolger goes over the last fence on the second day of the Grand National meeting at Aintree racecourse in Liverpool, northern England, April 4, 2008.
***
President George W. Bush tears up during a ceremony to present the Medal of Honor posthumously to Navy SEAL Petty Officer Michael Monsoor, in the East Room of the White House in Washington April 8, 2008. Monsoor died after diving onto a grenade during an attack on his combat team's sniper nest on September 29, 2006 in Ramadi, Iraq
***
Salman Rushdie works include:-
Midnight’s Children
The Satanic Verses
Shame
Shalimar the Clown
The Enchantress of Florence
***
Americans mark 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination
Flowers lie on the plaque that lays at Lorraine Motel, now part of the National Civil Rights Museum, where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968 in Memphis, April 4, 2008. April 4th marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of the civil rights leader who was shot as he stood on the balcony of Lorraine Motel
***
Honey Lee: world's No. 1 beauty (xinhua)
Honey Lee, Miss Korea Universe, is voted as the world's No.1 beauty on Globalbeauties.com
***
hongkong
***
Nose for News!!!
Take the following news quiz to check your current awareness.
1. What could you do with the $37 billion UBS lost?
Buy 4,000 tons of the best Caspian beluga caviar
Pay for the Olympic games in London in 2012 twice over
Buy almost 140,000 houses in the U.S. based on average price
All of the above (correct answer)
2. President Bush flattered French President Nicolas Sarkozy by comparing him to:
Elvis
3. A survey of classic rock radio fans showed they were more likely to vote:
Republican
4. According to outgoing Alitalia Chairman Maurizio Prato, who is the only one that can save the struggling airline?
An exorcist
5. A study debunked which myth about drinking eight glasses of water a day?
It improves your skin tone
6. Which brand has the biggest impact on world consumers, according to a survey this week?
Apple
7. Sixteen-year-old Ryuki Omura was crowned Japan's first nationwide champion for spinning...
A pen
8. What is the greatest guitar riff of all time, according to a poll by a London music school credited with teaching Radiohead, The Kinks and The Cure?
"Smoke on the Water" by Deep Purple
9. Which of the following April 1 headlines was not an April Fool's joke?
Pay-per-view funerals go live online
10. A man in Germany slept in a hotel instead of his two-story home because...
His weapons collections left him no space for living
***
Indian
***
"Etreinte" (Embrace), a watercolour, shows a nude Picasso entwined in an intimate embrace with his girlfriend Louise Lenoir, known as Odette.
***
News as spectacle
Headlines Today’s blah-blah-blah house advertisement turns criticism of frivolous news on its head. It lampoons those anchors and commentators who present and discuss serious news, showing them boring the wits out of a prostrate young viewer, l istlessly flipping channels. And then proceeds to make a virtue out of what it has to offer. Not information, God forbid, but something guaranteed to make the young and listless sit up.
One evening last week that meant anchor Gaurav Sawant in a pink polka dotted tie offering excited commentary on something picked up from Canada — a magazine cover shoot gone awry, with a tiger on a leash lunging at a woman. On the evening bulletin they played the attack (playful, even if it broke ribs) some five times in two minutes. By prime time at night the looping of that scene had speeded up to nine times in about a minute. “Refreshingly different?” Yeah, right.
The same night, Star News was shedding crocodile tears for women whose boyfriends made blue films by filming them surreptitiously, while News 24 was living off the story of the Bangalore couple where the husband killed his allegedly unfaithful wife and committed suicide. Since all this was on the night of R K Sharma’s sentencing in the Shivani Bhatnagar case, we should be grateful that they weren’t harking back ad nauseam to that murder and reconstructing it for us.
A new culture
A new book, News as Entertainment, quotes Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein’s apt description of what he called a “sleazoid information culture”: “...we teach our readers and our viewers that trivial is significant, that the lurid and the loopy are more important than real news.” If that sounds like it was written to describe what we are witnessing in India, well, the book says that India is the world’s largest news market today with some 40 satellite news channels, who are inventive practitioners of infotainment.
Daya Kishan Thussu’s take on the rise of global infotainment chronicles what is now a worldwide phenomenon, with a chapter allotted to India and its devotion to the three Cs: cinema, crime and cricket. News as Entertainment maps the political, economic and technological context of this major change in the culture of news. The shift from public service to private television journalism in the post Cold War era comes from the impact of liberalisation and deregulation, including trans-national liberalisation promoted by the World Trade Organisation. The technological context is new communication technologies, satellites and digital broadcasting which have made the global expansion of news and current affairs channels possible.
The fount of infotainment (the word was to be found in Roget’s Thesaurus by 1992, says the author) is of course the United States with its merger of entertainment and information corporations and the resulting commercialism of television news. He describes the entertainment giant Viacom, which owns Nickelodeon, MTV, Paramount Pictures as well as CBS News, as a “cradle-to-grave advertising depot” catering to all generations with its products. And then there is Murdoch and his Fox Network, whose sterling contribution to dumbing down, using live coverage of cricket to enter media markets worldwide, and selling war coverage as entertainment is duly documented. These are infotainment conglomerates that control both hardware and software, worldwide.
Blurring boundaries
Though it does not figure here, we are in the process of seeing the emergence of Indian infortainment conglomerates in UTV and Network 18, and in Anil Ambani’s growing media and entertainment empire. All three will produce and distribute everything from news to TV entertainment to movies in time to come. And doubtless, the distinctions between the three genres will become increasingly seamless.
And what does that do to how the viewer gets to see the world around him? We’ve already seen news channels in India dipping into movie clips to pad up coverage of events, and using actors to reconstruct crime stories. Thussu’s chapter on war and infotainment talks about the Fox-ification of war coverage, and it is worth harking back to on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war. What you saw in the early days after 9/11 if you were a viewer of Fox News was a correspondent reporting the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan like this: “We’ve been in various conflicts, and we’ve kept our chin up and kept focused on the fact that we want Osama bin Laden to end up either behind bars or six feet under or maybe just one foot under or maybe just a pile of ash you know. That’s it.” And the anchor adds, “All right. Well said, Geraldo.”
When the U.S. invasion of Iraq began, Fox News chose the Pentagon’s name for the invasion, “Operation Iraqi Freedom” as the tagline for its coverage, and instructed its reporters to refer to U.S. Marines as “sharp shooters” rather than “snipers”. Viewers evidently approved: Fox’s coverage got better ratings than the others, says Thussu. As Headlines Today will doubtless discover in its quest to be “refreshingly different”, once you’ve decided to dump the old norms of news reporting, the possibilities are endless. (source: The Hindu)
Essential notes for MCJ Entrance Test - Osmania University
Meet India's political yoga star Swami Ramdev
Election results
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh attends the commemoration of the 150th Birth Anniversary of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore in New Delhi on May 7, 2011. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced that the Government of India had decided to institute a prestigious International award in the name of Rabindranath Tagore to recognise very distinguished contributions towards the promotion of international brotherhood and fraternity.
Indian doctor Binayak Sen holds a biography book on him which were distributed at a seminar themed on "Attack by the State on the Life and Personal liberty of its people in Democratic India: Examining the Law on Sedition, other Draconian Laws and Human Rights Violations of Citizens under Ordinary Laws" in New Delhi May 7, 2011. The Supreme Court last month granted bail to Sen, a doctor who was sentenced to life for links with Maoists and disputed sedition charges against him in a case that sparked international scrutiny of the country's human rights record.
Osmania University BCJ Entrance Test 2010 current affairs plus
Journalism Entrance Test material 2009, Osmania University
BCJ 2008: BCJ (Bachelor of Communication and Journalism) Osmania University Entrnace Test Material
Words often used in the media
Kalpana Sharma is a Mumbai-based journalist and columnist and author of the book "Rediscovering Dharavi".
Great Soul, a book on Mahatma Gandhi was written by former editor Joseph Lelyveld
Actor Vikram becomes youth envoy for United Nations Human Settlement Programme - UN Habitat
BRIC economy to surpass US by 2015: Study
BRIC ( Brazil, Russia, Indian, China)
BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa)
South Africa's veteran all-rounder Jacques Kallis became the second all-rounder after Sri Lankan Sanath Jayasuriya to score 1,000 runs and pick up 20 wickets in the World Cup
India has overtaken China to become the world's largest importer of arms, a Sweden-based think tank says.
AP tops in crime against women
India's top court allows 'passive euthanasia'
India's Supreme Court ruled on Monday that life support can be legally removed for some terminally ill patients in a ruling that will allow "passive euthanasia" for the first time.
The Union Finance Minister Shri Pranab Mukherjee announced, in Lok Sabha today, an increase in the allocation under the MPLAD Scheme from Rs.2 crore to Rs.5 crore per Member.
Jasmine Revolution
the Tunisian Revolution in which President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was forced out of the presidency by popular protests in late 2010/early 2011, called "the Jasmine Revolution" by many media organisations, and which was the impetus of the 2010–2011 Middle East and North Africa protests.
Lakshmi Mittal replaces Mukesh Ambani as world's richest Indian.
Shane Watson scored 185 runs from 96 balls, including a record 15 sixes, while leading Australia to a nine-wicket victory over Bangladesh in their second one-day cricket International in Mirpur.
World Book Day - 3rd March
Death for 11, life for 20 accused in Godhra train burning case
PC Chacko appointed chairman of JPC on 2G scam
RIL-BP $7.2 bn deal among largest FDIs in India
Sachin Tendulkar is Wisden's leading cricketer for 2010
The Nobel Peace Prize 2010 was awarded to Liu Xiaobo "for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China".
"China has emerged as the world's second-largest economy, surpassing neighbouring Japan , which had held on to the position for over four decades.
"India's foreign exchange reserves went up by USD 243 million to USD 299.415 billion in the week ended February 4, driven by an increase in its foreign currency assets (FCAs)."
DMK's Kalaignar TV linked in 2G scam
"Hundreds of Indian students, mostly from Andhra Pradesh, face the prospect of deportation from the US after authorities raided and shut down a university in the Silicon Valley on charges of a massive immigration fraud.
The Tri-Valley University in Pleasanton, a major suburb in San Francisco Bay Area, has been charged by federal investigating authorities with being part of an effort to defraud, misuse visa permits and indulge in money laundering and other crimes."
SC grants bail to Binayak Sen
Actress-turned-director Nandita Das has been conferred with the Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters, one of the highest civilian awards of France, for her contribution to the development of Indo-French cooperation in cinema.
Anna Hazare wins Rabindranath Tagore peace award
Social activist Anna Hazare, who is on a fast-unto-death for a stronger anti-corruption Lokpal Bill, has been announced as the winner of the 2011 Rabindranath Tagore Peace Prize by the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM). The award carries a cash reward of one crore rupees, a gold medal and a citation.
Record centuries in World Cup
A record number of 24 centuries scored -- the highest in a single edition.
Zaheer Khan, who was instrumental in India's victorious effort in the World Cup, emerged as the leading wicket taker in the tournament with 21 wickets, a feat he shared with Pakistan Captain and leg spinner Shahid Afridi.
Siddhartha Mukherjee wins 2011 Pulitzer prize
Indian-American physician Siddhartha Mukherjee's acclaimed book on cancer, 'The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,' has won the prestigious 2011 Pulitzer prize in the general non-fiction category.
Newsmakers:-
Anna Hazare, more on Hazare
A. Raja - Spectrum 2G scam
Facebook
Twitter
Social Media
Social Networking
Lokpal Bill
Srikrishna Committee
Telangana
Julian Assange
WikiLeaks
Barkha Dutt
Niira Radia
Vir Sanghvi
Guardian newspaper
Cricket World Cup 2011
- man of the series - Yuvraj Singh
- man of the match in final - MS Dhoni
- final match held in Wankhede Stadium, Mumbai
Satya Sai Baba
Poonam Pandey
Inflation
Hasan Ali
Fukushima
Japan earthquake / tsunami
Hosni Mubarak
Silvio Berlusconi
PJ Thomas : CVC Thomas: A chronology
Tahrir Square
Adarsh Housing
Pt. Bhimsen Joshi
The Alchemist has been translated into more than 67 languages, winning the Guiness World Record for most translated book by a living author.
Great Soul, a book on Mahatma Gandhi was written by former editor Joseph Lelyveld
Actor Vikram becomes youth envoy for United Nations Human Settlement Programme - UN Habitat
BRIC economy to surpass US by 2015: Study
BRIC ( Brazil, Russia, Indian, China)
BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa)
South Africa's veteran all-rounder Jacques Kallis became the second all-rounder after Sri Lankan Sanath Jayasuriya to score 1,000 runs and pick up 20 wickets in the World Cup
India has overtaken China to become the world's largest importer of arms, a Sweden-based think tank says.
AP tops in crime against women
India's top court allows 'passive euthanasia'
India's Supreme Court ruled on Monday that life support can be legally removed for some terminally ill patients in a ruling that will allow "passive euthanasia" for the first time.
The Union Finance Minister Shri Pranab Mukherjee announced, in Lok Sabha today, an increase in the allocation under the MPLAD Scheme from Rs.2 crore to Rs.5 crore per Member.
Jasmine Revolution
the Tunisian Revolution in which President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was forced out of the presidency by popular protests in late 2010/early 2011, called "the Jasmine Revolution" by many media organisations, and which was the impetus of the 2010–2011 Middle East and North Africa protests.
Lakshmi Mittal replaces Mukesh Ambani as world's richest Indian.
Shane Watson scored 185 runs from 96 balls, including a record 15 sixes, while leading Australia to a nine-wicket victory over Bangladesh in their second one-day cricket International in Mirpur.
World Book Day - 3rd March
Death for 11, life for 20 accused in Godhra train burning case
PC Chacko appointed chairman of JPC on 2G scam
RIL-BP $7.2 bn deal among largest FDIs in India
Sachin Tendulkar is Wisden's leading cricketer for 2010
The Nobel Peace Prize 2010 was awarded to Liu Xiaobo "for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China".
"China has emerged as the world's second-largest economy, surpassing neighbouring Japan , which had held on to the position for over four decades.
"India's foreign exchange reserves went up by USD 243 million to USD 299.415 billion in the week ended February 4, driven by an increase in its foreign currency assets (FCAs)."
DMK's Kalaignar TV linked in 2G scam
"Hundreds of Indian students, mostly from Andhra Pradesh, face the prospect of deportation from the US after authorities raided and shut down a university in the Silicon Valley on charges of a massive immigration fraud.
The Tri-Valley University in Pleasanton, a major suburb in San Francisco Bay Area, has been charged by federal investigating authorities with being part of an effort to defraud, misuse visa permits and indulge in money laundering and other crimes."
SC grants bail to Binayak Sen
Actress-turned-director Nandita Das has been conferred with the Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters, one of the highest civilian awards of France, for her contribution to the development of Indo-French cooperation in cinema.
Anna Hazare wins Rabindranath Tagore peace award
Social activist Anna Hazare, who is on a fast-unto-death for a stronger anti-corruption Lokpal Bill, has been announced as the winner of the 2011 Rabindranath Tagore Peace Prize by the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM). The award carries a cash reward of one crore rupees, a gold medal and a citation.
Record centuries in World Cup
A record number of 24 centuries scored -- the highest in a single edition.
Zaheer Khan, who was instrumental in India's victorious effort in the World Cup, emerged as the leading wicket taker in the tournament with 21 wickets, a feat he shared with Pakistan Captain and leg spinner Shahid Afridi.
Siddhartha Mukherjee wins 2011 Pulitzer prize
Indian-American physician Siddhartha Mukherjee's acclaimed book on cancer, 'The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,' has won the prestigious 2011 Pulitzer prize in the general non-fiction category.
Newsmakers:-
Anna Hazare, more on Hazare
A. Raja - Spectrum 2G scam
Social Media
Social Networking
Lokpal Bill
Srikrishna Committee
Telangana
Julian Assange
WikiLeaks
Barkha Dutt
Niira Radia
Vir Sanghvi
Guardian newspaper
Cricket World Cup 2011
- man of the series - Yuvraj Singh
- man of the match in final - MS Dhoni
- final match held in Wankhede Stadium, Mumbai
Satya Sai Baba
Poonam Pandey
Inflation
Hasan Ali
Fukushima
Japan earthquake / tsunami
Hosni Mubarak
Silvio Berlusconi
PJ Thomas : CVC Thomas: A chronology
Tahrir Square
Adarsh Housing
Pt. Bhimsen Joshi
The Alchemist has been translated into more than 67 languages, winning the Guiness World Record for most translated book by a living author.
MA English entrance test 2009, OU
Osmania University MA English Entrance Test paper questions held on 14.6.2008 (based on memory)
Synonyms:
Prognosis
Compuction
Vendetta
Alacrity
Mottled
Plain
Vitriolic
Ravishing
Impudent
Craggy
--------------------
Antonyms:
Alleviation
Extravagant
Antipathy
Autonomous
malign
Spelling mistakes:
--------------------------
affeminate
obsene
notorius
deprecaite
apethetic
-------------
Literature:-
The snake slowly, silently, slithered towards its prey
The device of using character or story elements symbolically to represent an abstraction in addition to te literary meaning.
A statement that appears to be self contradictory or opposed to common sense but upon closer inspection contains some degree of truth or validity is called.
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, the furrow followed free..
The error of evaluating a poem by its emotional effects is known as
children's doctor - pediatrician
myopia
collectors of stamps - a philatelist
The Prelude writer
The guide heroine
Coffee-House culture which century
The Lyrical Ballads written by
Elia - Lamb
Ben Johnson comedies...
To Autumn is a....
Andrea del Sarto...
Poetry - criticism of life who said.
The periodical essay by
Shakespeare plays
The Pilgrim's progress
Dryden is the master of..
To strive.... Tennyson... Ulysses
They also serve who only stand and wait...
The English Teacher written by
Vanity Fair written by
Othello tragic flaw - jealousy
Shakespeare wife's name
Dr Faustus...
Fools rush...
Samuel Johnson's biographer
French revolution backdrop - A Tale of Two cities
Gulliver's Travels human race..
George Bernard Shaw learnt from his mother...
Nobel Prize winner from Africa
Ibsen originally wrote in which language
Harry Potter books writer
A room of one's own - Virginia Woolf
Vikram Seth book
A book by Jawaharlal Nehru in the form of letters
Biographia literaria by Coleridge defines which theory
John Donne - meta physical
Art for art's sake who said.
Swinburne, Rossetti and Morris
Look back in anger book by
absurd plays
didactic meaning
Pope
First english dictionary compiled by
Willing suspension of disbelief
Essayist
John Gay
First para of sonnet
The Second coming book author
Into the heaven of freedom / O Father
Elegy
Ben Johnson - humour definition.
Walt Whitman which country
Sherlock Homes
The Mill... book written by
VS Naipaul born in which country
War and Peace written by
=================================================
William Wordsworth
TS Eliot
Shakespeare
Rudyard Kipling
Jane Austen
George Orwell
Francis Bacon
Edward Morgan Forster
Charles John Huffam Dickens
Bertrand Russell
George Bernard Shaw
V. S. Naipaul
Doris Lessing
Salman Rushdie
John Donne
John Dryden
Alfred Lord Tennyson
George Gordon Noel Byron
Geoffrey Chaucer
Charles Dickens
PB Shelly
Charles Darwin
J.M. Coetzee
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
George Eliot
Oscar Wilde
James Joyce
English literature
======================================================
The term English literature refers to literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; Joseph Conrad was Polish, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, Salman Rushdie is Indian, V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, Vladimir Nabokov was Russian. In other words, English literature is as diverse as the varieties and dialects of English spoken around the world. In academia, the term often labels departments and programmes practising English studies in secondary and tertiary educational systems.
This article primarily deals with literature from Britain written in English. For literature from specific English-speaking regions, see the see also section at the bottom of the page.
Old English
Main article: Anglo-Saxon literature
The first works in English, written in Old English, appeared in the early Middle Ages (the oldest surviving text is Cædmon's Hymn). The oral tradition was very strong in early British culture and most literary works were written to be performed. Epic poems were thus very popular and many, including Beowulf, have survived to the present day in the rich corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature that closely resemble today's Norwegian or, better yet, Icelandic. Much Anglo-Saxon verse in the extant manuscripts is probably a "milder" adaptation of the earlier Viking and German war poems from the continent. When such poetry was brought to England it was still being handed down orally from one generation to another, and the constant presence of alliterative verse, or consonant rhyme (today's newspaper headlines and marketing abundantly use this technique such as in Big is Better) helped the Anglo-Saxon peoples remember it. Such rhyme is a feature of Germanic languages and is opposed to vocalic or end-rhyme of Romance languages. But the first written literature dates to the early Christian monasteries founded by St. Augustine of Canterbury and his disciples and it is reasonable to believe that it was somehow adapted to suit to needs of Christian readers. Even without their crudest lines, Viking war poems still smell of blood feuds and their consonant rhymes sound like the smashing of swords under the gloomy northern sky: there is always a sense of imminent danger in the narratives. Sooner or later, all things must come to an end, as Beowulf eventually dies at the hands of the monsters he spends the tale fighting. The feelings of Beowulf that nothing lasts, that youth and joy will turn to death and sorrow entered Christianity and were to dominate the future landscape of English fiction.
[] Middle English
Further information: Medieval literature, Anglo-Norman literature, and Middle English
England's first great author, Geoffrey Chaucer (1340 -1400), wrote in Middle English. His most famous work is The Canterbury Tales, a collection of stories in a variety of genres, ostensibly told by a group of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury. Remarkably, they are from all walks of life, which is reflected as much in the language they use as in the content of their stories. But, though Chaucer is most certainly an English author, he was inspired by literary developments taking place elsewhere in Europe, especially in Italy. The Canterbury Tales are quite indebted to Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron. The Renaissance was making its way to Britain.
[] Renaissance literature
Main article: English Renaissance
Following the introduction of a printing press into England by William Caxton in 1476, vernacular literature flourished. The Reformation inspired the production of vernacular liturgy which led to the Book of Common Prayer, a lasting influence on literary English language. The poetry, drama, and prose produced under both Queen Elizabeth I and King James I constitute what is today labelled as Early modern (or Renaissance).
[] Early Modern period
Further information: Early Modern English and Early Modern Britain
[] Elizabethan era
Main article: Elizabethan literature
The Elizabethan era saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in the field of drama. The Italian Renaissance had rediscovered the ancient Greek and Roman theatre, and this was instrumental in the development of the new drama, which was then beginning to evolve apart from the old mystery and miracle plays of the Middle Ages. The Italians were particularly inspired by Seneca (a major tragic playwright and philosopher, the tutor of Nero) and Plautus (its comic clichés, especially that of the boasting soldier had a powerful influence on the Renaissance and after). However, the Italian tragedies embraced a principle contrary to Seneca's ethics: showing blood and violence on the stage. In Seneca's plays such scenes were only acted by the characters. But the English playwrights were intrigued by Italian model: a conspicuous community of Italian actors had settled in London and Giovanni Florio had brought much of the Italian language and culture to England. It is also true that the Elizabethan Era was a very violent age and that the high incidence of political assassinations in Renaissance Italy (embodied by Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince) did little to calm fears of popish plots. As a result, representing that kind of violence on the stage was probably more cathartic for the Elizabethan spectator. Following earlier Elizabethan plays such as Gorboduc by Sackville & Norton and The Spanish Tragedy by Kyd that was to provide much material for Hamlet, William Shakespeare stands out in this period as a poet and playwright as yet unsurpassed. Shakespeare was not a man of letters by profession, and probably had only some grammar school education. He was neither a lawyer, nor an aristocrat as the "university wits" that had monopolised the English stage when he started writing. But he was very gifted and incredibly versatile, and he surpassed "professionals" as Robert Greene who mocked this "shake-scene" of low origins. Though most dramas met with great success, it is in his later years (marked by the early reign of James I) that he wrote what have been considered his greatest plays: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest, a tragicomedy that inscribes within the main drama a brilliant pageant to the new king. This 'play within a play' takes the form of a masque, an interlude with music and dance coloured by the novel special effects of the new indoor theatres. Critics have shown that this masterpiece, which can be considered a dramatic work in its own right, was written for James's court, if not for the monarch himself. The magic arts of Prospero, on which depend the outcome of the plot, hint at the fine relationship between art and nature in poetry. Significantly for those times (the arrival of the first colonists in America), The Tempest is (though not apparently) set on a Bermudan island, as research on the Bermuda Pamphlets (1609) has shown, linking Shakespeare to the Virginia Company itself. The "News from the New World", as Frank Kermode points out, were already out and Shakespeare's interest in this respect is remarkable. Shakespeare also popularized the English sonnet which made significant changes to Petrarch's model.
The sonnet was introduced into English by Thomas Wyatt in the early 16th century. Poems intended to be set to music as songs, such as by Thomas Campion, became popular as printed literature was disseminated more widely in households. See English Madrigal School. Other important figures in Elizabethan theatre include Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont. Had Marlowe (1564-1593) not been stabbed at twenty-nine in a tavern brawl, says Anthony Burgess, he might have rivalled, if not equalled Shakespeare himself for his poetic gifts. Remarkably, he was born only a few weeks before Shakespeare and must have known him well. Marlowe's subject matter, though, is different: it focuses more on the moral drama of the renaissance man than any other thing. Marlowe was fascinated and terrified by the new frontiers opened by modern science. Drawing on German lore, he introduced Dr. Faustus to England, a scientist and magician who is obsessed by the thirst of knowledge and the desire to push man's technological power to its limits. He acquires supernatural gifts that even allow him to go back in time and wed Helen of Troy, but at the end of his twenty-four years' covenant with the devil he has to surrender his soul to him. His dark heroes may have something of Marlowe himself, whose untimely death remains a mystery. He was known for being an atheist, leading a lawless life, keeping many mistresses, consorting with ruffians: living the 'high life' of London's underworld. But many suspect that this might have been a cover-up for his activities as a secret agent for Elizabeth I, hinting that the 'accidental stabbing' might have been a premated assassination by the enemies of The Crown. Beaumont and Fletcher are less-known, but it is almost sure that they helped Shakespeare write some of his best dramas, and were quite popular at the time. It is also at this time that the city comedy genre develops. In the later 16th century English poetry was characterised by elaboration of language and extensive allusion to classical myths. The most important poets of this era include Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney. Elizabeth herself, a product of Renaissance humanism, produced occasional poems such as On Monsieur’s Departure.
Canons of Renaissance poetry
[] Jacobean literature
After Shakespeare's death, the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson was the leading literary figure of the Jacobean era (The reign of James I). However, Jonson's aesthetics hark back to the Middle Ages rather than to the Tudor Era: his characters embody the theory of humours. According to this contemporary medical theory, behavioral differences result from a prevalence of one of the body's four "humours" (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile) over the other three; these humours correspond with the four elements of the universe: air, water, fire, and earth. This leads Jonson to exemplify such differences to the point of creating types, or clichés.
Jonson is a master of style, and a brilliant satirist. His Volpone shows how a group of scammers are fooled by a top con-artist, vice being punished by vice, virtue meting out its reward.
Others who followed Jonson's style include Beaumont and Fletcher, who wrote the brilliant comedy, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, a mockery of the rising middle class and especially of those nouveaux riches who pretend to dictate literary taste without knowing much literature at all. In the story, a couple of grocers wrangle with professional actors to have their illiterate son play a leading role in a drama. He becomes a knight-errant wearing, appropriately, a burning pestle on his shield. Seeking to win a princess' heart, the young man is ridiculed much in the way Don Quixote was. One of Beaumont and Fletcher's chief merits was that of realising how feudalism and chivalry had turned into snobbery and make-believe and that new social classes were on the rise.
Another popular style of theatre during Jacobean times was the revenge play, popularized by John Webster and Thomas Kyd. George Chapman wrote a couple of subtle revenge tragedies, but must be remembered chiefly on account of his famous translation of Homer, one that had a profound influence on all future English literature, even inspiring John Keats to write one of his best sonnets.
The King James Bible, one of the most massive translation projects in the history of English up to this time, was started in 1604 and completed in 1611. It represents the culmination of a tradition of Bible translation into English that began with the work of William Tyndale. It became the standard Bible of the Church of England, and some consider it one of the greatest literary works of all time. This project was headed by James I himself, who supervised the work of forty-seven scholars. Although many other translations into English have been made, some of which are widely considered more accurate, many aesthetically prefer the King James Bible, whose meter is made to mimic the original Hebrew verse.
Besides Shakespeare, whose figure towers over the early 1600s, the major poets of the early 17th century included John Donne and the other Metaphysical poets. Influenced by continental Baroque, and taking as his subject matter both Christian mysticism and eroticism, metaphysical poetry uses unconventional or "unpoetic" figures, such as a compass or a mosquito, to reach surprise effects. For example, in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning", one of Donne's Songs and Sonnets, the points of a compass represent two lovers, the woman who is home, waiting, being the centre, the farther point being her lover sailing away from her. But the larger the distance, the more the hands of the compass lean to each other: separation makes love grow fonder. The paradox or the oxymoron is a constant in this poetry whose fears and anxieties also speak of a world of spiritual certainties shaken by the modern discoveries of geography and science, one that is no longer the centre of the universe. Apart from the metaphysical poetry of Donne, the 17th century is also celebrated for its Baroque poetry. Baroque poetry served the same ends as the art of the period; the Baroque style is lofty, sweeping, epic, and religious. Many of these poets have an overtly Catholic sensibility (namely Richard Crashaw) and wrote poetry for the Catholic counter-Reformation in order to establish a feeling of supremacy and mysticism that would ideally persuade newly emerging Protestant groups back toward Catholicism.
[] Caroline and Cromwellian literature
The turbulent years of the mid-17th century, during the reign of Charles I and the subsequent Commonwealth and Protectorate, saw a flourishing of political literature in English. Pamphlets written by sympathisers of every faction in the English civil war ran from vicious personal attacks and polemics, through many forms of propaganda, to high-minded schemes to reform the nation. Of the latter type, Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes would prove to be one of the most important works of British political philosophy. Hobbes's writings are some of the few political works from the era which are still regularly published while John Bramhall, who was Hobbes's chief critic, is largely forgotten. The period also saw a flourishing of news books, the precursors to the British newspaper, with journalists such as Henry Muddiman, Marchamont Needham, and John Birkenhead representing the views and activities of the contending parties. The frequent arrests of authors and the suppression of their works, with the consequence of foreign or underground printing, led to the proposal of a licensing system. The Areopagitica, a political pamphlet by John Milton, was written in opposition to licensing and is regarded as one of the most eloquent defenses of press freedom ever written.
Specifically in the reign of Charles I (1625 – 42), English Renaissance theatre experienced its concluding efflorescence. The last works of Ben Jonson appeared on stage and in print, along with the final generation of major voices in the drama of the age: John Ford, Philip Massinger, James Shirley, and Richard Brome. With the closure of the theatres at the start of the English Civil War in 1642, drama was suppressed for a generation, to resume only in the altered society of the English Restoration in 1660.
Other forms of literature written during this period are usually ascribed political subtexts, or their authors are grouped along political lines. The cavalier poets, active mainly before the civil war, owed much to the earlier school of metaphysical poets. The forced retirement of royalist officials after the execution of Charles I was a good thing in the case of Izaak Walton, as it gave him time to work on his book The Compleat Angler. Published in 1653, the book, ostensibly a guide to fishing, is much more: a mation on life, leisure, and contentment. The two most important poets of Oliver Cromwell's England were Andrew Marvell and John Milton, with both producing works praising the new government; such as Marvell's An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland. Despite their republican beliefs they escaped punishment upon the Restoration of Charles II, after which Milton wrote some of his greatest poetical works (with any possible political message hidden under allegory). Thomas Browne was another writer of the period; a learned man with an extensive library, he wrote prolifically on science, religion, medicine and the esoteric.
[] Restoration literature
Milton's Paradise Lost tells a story of pride and rebellion.
Main article: Restoration Literature
Restoration literature includes both Paradise Lost and the Earl of Rochester's Sodom, the high spirited sexual comedy of The Country Wife and the moral wisdom of Pilgrim's Progress. It saw Locke's Treatises on Government, the founding of the Royal Society, the experiments of Robert Boyle and the holy mations of Boyle, the hysterical attacks on theatres from Jeremy Collier, the pioneering of literary criticism from Dryden, and the first newspapers. The official break in literary culture caused by censorship and radically moralist standards under Cromwell's Puritan regime created a gap in literary tradition, allowing a seemingly fresh start for all forms of literature after the Restoration. During the Interregnum, the royalist forces attached to the court of Charles I went into exile with the twenty-year old Charles II. The nobility who travelled with Charles II were therefore lodged for over a decade in the midst of the continent's literary scene. Charles spent his time attending plays in France, and he developed a taste for Spanish plays. Those nobles living in Holland began to learn about mercantile exchange as well as the tolerant, rationalist prose debates that circulated in that officially tolerant nation.
The largest and most important poetic form of the era was satire. In general, publication of satire was done anonymously. There were great dangers in being associated with a satire. On the one hand, defamation law was a wide net, and it was difficult for a satirist to avoid prosecution if he were proven to have written a piece that seemed to criticize a noble. On the other hand, wealthy individuals would respond to satire as often as not by having the suspected poet physically attacked by ruffians. John Dryden was set upon for being merely suspected of having written the Satire on Mankind. A consequence of this anonymity is that a great many poems, some of them of merit, are unpublished and largely unknown.
Prose in the Restoration period is dominated by Christian religious writing, but the Restoration also saw the beginnings of two genres that would dominate later periods: fiction and journalism. Religious writing often strayed into political and economic writing, just as political and economic writing implied or directly addressed religion. The Restoration was also the time when John Locke wrote many of his philosophical works. Locke's empiricism was an attempt at understanding the basis of human understanding itself and thereby devising a proper manner for making sound decisions. These same scientific methods led Locke to his three Treatises on Government, which later inspired the thinkers in the American Revolution. As with his work on understanding, Locke moves from the most basic units of society toward the more elaborate, and, like Thomas Hobbes, he emphasizes the plastic nature of the social contract. For an age that had seen absolute monarchy overthrown, democracy attempted, democracy corrupted, and limited monarchy restored, only a flexible basis for government could be satisfying. The Restoration moderated most of the more strident sectarian writing, but radicalism persisted after the Restoration. Puritan authors such as John Milton were forced to retire from public life or adapt, and those Digger, Fifth Monarchist, Leveller, Quaker, and Anabaptist authors who had preached against monarchy and who had participated directly in the regicide of Charles I were partially suppressed. Consequently, violent writings were forced underground, and many of those who had served in the Interregnum attenuated their positions in the Restoration. John Bunyan stands out beyond other religious authors of the period. Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory of personal salvation and a guide to the Christian life. Instead of any focus on eschatology or divine retribution, Bunyan instead writes about how the individual saint can prevail against the temptations of mind and body that threaten damnation. The book is written in a straightforward narrative and shows influence from both drama and biography, and yet it also shows an awareness of the grand allegorical tradition found in Edmund Spenser. During the Restoration period, the most common manner of getting news would have been a broadsheet publication. A single, large sheet of paper might have a written, usually partisan, account of an event. However, the period saw the beginnings of the first professional and periodical (meaning that the publication was regular) journalism in England. Journalism develops late, generally around the time of William of Orange's claiming the throne in 1689. Coincidentally or by design, England began to have newspapers just when William came to court from Amsterdam, where there were already newspapers being published.
First ion of Oroonoko, 1688.
It is impossible to satisfactorily date the beginning of the novel in English. However, long fiction and fictional biographies began to distinguish themselves from other forms in England during the Restoration period. An existing tradition of Romance fiction in France and Spain was popular in England. The "Romance" was considered a feminine form, and women were taxed with reading "novels" as a vice. One of the most significant figures in the rise of the novel in the Restoration period is Aphra Behn. She was not only the first professional female novelist, but she may be among the first professional novelists of either sex in England. Behn's most famous novel was Oroonoko in 1688. This was a biography of an entirely fictional African king who had been enslaved in Suriname. Behn's novels show the influence of tragedy and her experiences as a dramatist.
As soon as the previous Puritan regime's ban on public stage representations was lifted, the drama recreated itself quickly and abundantly. The most famous plays of the early Restoration period are the unsentimental or "hard" comedies of John Dryden, William Wycherley, and George Etherege, which reflect the atmosphere at Court, and celebrate an aristocratic macho lifestyle of unremitting sexual intrigue and conquest. After a sharp drop in both quality and quantity in the 1680s, the mid-90s saw a brief second flowering of the drama, especially comedy. Comedies like William Congreve's Love For Love (1695) and The Way of the World (1700), and John Vanbrugh's The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697) were "softer" and more middle-class in ethos, very different from the aristocratic extravaganza twenty years earlier, and aimed at a wider audience. The playwrights of the 1690s set out to appeal to more socially mixed audiences with a strong middle-class element, and to female spectators, for instance by moving the war between the sexes from the arena of intrigue into that of marriage. The focus in comedy is less on young lovers outwitting the older generation, more on marital relations after the wedding bells.
Diarists John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys depicted everyday London life and the cultural scene of the times.
[] Augustan literature
Main article: Augustan literature
The term Augustan literature derives from authors of the 1720s and 1730's themselves, who responded to a term that George I of England preferred for himself. While George I meant the title to reflect his might, they instead saw in it a reflection of Ancient Rome's transition from rough and ready literature to highly political and highly polished literature. Because of the aptness of the metaphor, the period from 1689 - 1750 was called "the Augustan Age" by critics throughout the 18th century (including Voltaire and Oliver Goldsmith). The literature of the period is overtly political and thoroughly aware of critical dictates for literature. It is an age of exuberance and scandal, of enormous energy and inventiveness and outrage, that reflected an era when English, Scottish, and Irish people found themselves in the midst of an expanding economy, lowering barriers to education, and the stirrings of the Industrial Revolution.
The most outstanding poet of the age is Alexander Pope, but Pope's excellence is partially in his constant battle with other poets, and his serene, seemingly neo-Classical approach to poetry is in competition with highly idiosyncratic verse and strong competition from such poets as Ambrose Philips. It was during this time that James Thomson produced his melancholy The Seasons and Edward Young wrote Night Thoughts. It is also the era that saw a serious competition over the proper model for the pastoral. In criticism, poets struggled with a doctrine of decorum, of matching proper words with proper sense and of achieving a diction that matched the gravity of a subject. At the same time, the mock-heroic was at its zenith. Pope's Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad are still the greatest mock-heroic poems ever written.
In prose, the earlier part of the period was overshadowed by the development of the English essay. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's The Spectator established the form of the British periodical essay, inventing the pose of the detached observer of human life who can mate upon the world without advocating any specific changes in it. However, this was also the time when the English novel, first emerging in the Restoration, developed into a major artform. Daniel Defoe turned from journalism and writing criminal lives for the press to writing fictional criminal lives with Roxana and Moll Flanders. He also wrote a fictional treatment of the travels of Alexander Selkirk called Robinson Crusoe (1719). The novel would benefit indirectly from a tragedy of the stage, and in mid-century many more authors would begin to write novels.
If Addison and Steele overawed one type of prose, then Jonathan Swift did another. Swift's prose style is unmannered and direct, with a clarity that few contemporaries matched. He was a profound skeptic about the modern world, but he was similarly profoundly distrustful of nostalgia. He saw in history a record of lies and vanity, and he saw in the present a madness of vanity and lies. Core Christian values were essential, but these values had to be muscular and assertive and developed by constant rejection of the games of confidence men and their gullies. Swift's A Tale of a Tub announced his skeptical analysis of the claims of the modern world, and his later prose works, such as his war with Patridge the astrologer, and most of all his derision of pride in Gulliver's Travels left only the individual in constant fear and humility safe. After his "exile" to Ireland, Swift reluctantly began defending the Irish people from the predations of colonialism. His A Modest Proposal and the Drapier Letters provoked riots and arrests, but Swift, who had no love of Irish Roman Catholics, was outraged by the abuses and barbarity he saw around him.
Drama in the early part of the period featured the last plays of John Vanbrugh and William Congreve, both of whom carried on the Restoration comedy with some alterations. However, the majority of stagings were of lower farces and much more serious and domestic tragedies. George Lillo and Richard Steele both produced highly moral forms of tragedy, where the characters and the concerns of the characters were wholly middle class or working class. This reflected a marked change in the audience for plays, as royal patronage was no longer the important part of theatrical success. Additionally, Colley Cibber and John Rich began to battle each other for greater and greater spectacles to present on stage. The figure of Harlequin was introduced, and pantomime theatre began to be staged. This "low" comedy was quite popular, and the plays became tertiary to the staging. Opera also began to be popular in London, and there was significant literary resistance to this Italian incursion. This trend was broken only by a few attempts at a new type of comedy. Pope and John Arbuthnot and John Gay attempted a play entitled Three Hours After Marriage that failed. In 1728, however, John Gay returned to the playhouse with The Beggar's Opera. Gay's opera was in English and retold the story of Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild. However, it seemed to be an allegory for Robert Walpole and the directors of the South Sea Company, and so Gay's follow up opera was banned without performance. The licensing act of 1737 brought an abrupt halt to much of the period's drama, as the theatres were once again brought under state control.
An effect of the Licensing Act was to cause more than one aspiring playwright to switch over to writing novels. Henry Fielding began to write prose satire and novels after his plays could not pass the censors. Henry Brooke also turned to novels. In the interim, Samuel Richardson had produced a novel intended to counter the deleterious effects of novels in Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1749). Henry Fielding attacked the absurdity of this novel with two of his own works, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, and then countered Richardson's Clarissa with Tom Jones. Brooke wrote The Man of Feeling and indirectly began the sentimental novel. Laurence Sterne attempted a Swiftian novel with a unique perspective on the impossibility of biography (the model for most novels up to that point) and understanding with Tristram Shandy, even as his detractor Tobias Smollett elevated the picaresque novel with his works. Each of these novels represents a formal and thematic divergence from the others. Each novelist was in dialogue and competition with the others, and, in a sense, the novel established itself as a diverse and open-formed genre in this explosion of creativity. The most lasting effects of the experimentation would be the psychological realism of Richardson, the bemused narrative voice of Fielding, and the sentimentality of Brooke.
[] 18th century
Further information: 18th century literature
During the Age of Sensibility, literature reflected the worldview of the Age of Enlightenment (or Age of Reason) – a rational and scientific approach to religious, social, political, and economic issues that promoted a secular view of the world and a general sense of progress and perfectibility. Led by the philosophers who were inspired by the discoveries of the previous century (Newton) and the writings of Descartes, Locke and Bacon. They sought to discover and to act upon universally valid principles governing humanity, nature, and society. They variously attacked spiritual and scientific authority, dogmatism, intolerance, censorship, and economic and social restraints. They considered the state the proper and rational instrument of progress. The extreme rationalism and skepticism of the age led naturally to deism; the same qualities played a part in bringing the later reaction of romanticism.
The Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot epitomized the spirit of the age.
Increased emphasis on instinct and feeling, rather than judgment and restraint. A growing sympathy for the Middle Ages during the Age of Sensibility sparked an interest in medieval ballads and folk literature.
[] Romanticism
Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice continues to inspire writers, film-makers, audiences and readers
The changing landscape of Britain brought about by the steam engine has two major outcomes: the boom of industrialism with the expansion of the city, and the consequent depopulation of the countryside as a result of the enclosures, or privatisation of pastures. Most peasants poured into the city to work in the new factories.
This abrupt change is revealed by the change of meaning in five key words: industry (once meaning "creativity"), democracy (once disparagingly used as "mob rule"), class (from now also used with a social connotation), art (once just meaning "craft"), culture (once only belonging to farming).
But the poor condition of workers, the new class-conflicts and the pollution of the environment causes a reaction to urbanism and industrialisation prompting poets to rediscover the beauty and value of nature. Mother earth is seen as the only source of wisdom, the only solution to the ugliness caused by machines.
The superiority of nature and instinct over civilisation had been preached by Jean Jacques Rousseau and his message was picked by almost all European poets. The first in England were the Lake Poets, a small group of friends including William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. These early Romantic Poets brought a new emotionalism and introspection, and their emergence is marked by the first romantic Manifesto in English literature, the "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads". This collection was mostly contributed by Wordsworth, although Coleridge must be cred for his long and impressive Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a tragic ballad about the survival of one sailor through a series of supernatural events on his voyage through the south seas which involves the slaying of an albatross, the death of the rest of the crew, a visit from Death and his mate, Life-in-Death, and the eventual redemption of the Mariner.
Coleridge and Wordsworth, however, understood romanticism in two entirely different ways: while Coleridge sought to make the supernatural "real" (much like sci-fi movies use special effects to make unlikely plots believable), Wordsworth sought to stir the imagination of readers through his down-to-earth characters taken from real life (for eg. in "The Idiot Boy"), or the beauty of the Lake District that largely inspired his production (as in "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey").
The "Second generation" of Romantic poets includes Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and John Keats. Byron, however, was still influenced by 18th-century satirists and was, perhaps the least 'romantic' of the three. His amours with a number of prominent but married ladies was also a way to voice his dissent on the hypocrisy of a high society that was only apparently religious but in fact largely libertine, the same that had derided him for being physically impaired. His first trip to Europe resulted in the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, a mock-heroic epic of a young man's adventures in Europe but also a sharp satire against London society. Despite Childe Harold's success on his return to England, accompanied by the publication of The Giaour and The Corsair his alleged incestuous affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh in 1816 actually forced him to leave England for good and seek asylum on the continent. Here he joined Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife Mary, with his secretary Dr. John Polidori on the shores of Lake Geneva during the 'year without a summer' of 1816.
Although his is just a short story, Polidori must be cred for introducing The Vampyre, conceived from the same competition which spawned Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, to English literature. Percy, like Mary, had much in common with Byron: he was an aristocrat from a famous and ancient family, had embraced atheism and free-thinking and, like him, was fleeing from scandal in England.
Shelley had been expelled from college for openly declaring his atheism. He had married a 16-year-old girl, Harriet Westbrook whom he had abandoned soon after for Mary (Harriet took her own life after that). Harriet did not embrace his ideals of free love and anarchism, and was not as educated as to contribute to literary debate. Mary was different: the daughter of philosopher and revolutionary William Godwin, she was intellectually more of an equal, shared some of his ideals and was a feminist like her late mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of Vindication of the Rights of Women.
One of Shelley's best works is the Ode to the West Wind. Despite his apparent refusal to believe in God, this poem is considered a homage to pantheism, the recognition of a spiritual presence in nature.
Mary Shelley did not go down in history for her poetry, but for giving birth to science fiction: the plot for the novel is said to have come from a nightmare during stormy nights on Lake Geneva in the company of Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori. Her idea of making a body with human parts stolen from different corpses and then animating it with electricity was perhaps influenced by Alessandro Volta's invention and Luigi Galvani's experiments with dead frogs. Frankenstein's chilling tale also suggests modern organ transplants, tissue regeneration, reminding us of the moral issues raised by today's medicine. But the creature of Frankenstein is incredibly romantic as well. Although "the monster" is intelligent, good and loving, he is shunned by everyone because of his ugliness and deformity, and the desperation and envy that result from social exclusion turn him against the very man who created him.
John Keats did not share Byron's and Shelley's extremely revolutionary ideals, but his cult of pantheism is as important as Shelley's. Keats was in love with the ancient stones of the Parthenon that Lord Elgin had brought to England from Greece, also known as the Elgin Marbles). He celebrates ancient Greece: the beauty of free, youthful love couples here with that of classical art. Keats's great attention to art, especially in his Ode on a Grecian Urn is quite new in romanticism, and it will inspire Walter Pater's and then Oscar Wilde's belief in the absolute value of art as independent from aesthetics.
The most popular novelist of the era was Sir Walter Scott, whose grand historical romances inspired a generation of painters, composers, and writers throughout Europe. By contrast, Jane Austen wrote novels about the life of the landed gentry, seen from a woman's point of view, and wryly focused on practical social issues, especially marriage and money.
Poet, painter and printmaker William Blake is usually included among the English Romanticists, though his visionary work is much different from that of the others discussed in this section.
[] Victorian literature
Main article: Victorian literature
It was in the Victorian era (1837-1901) that the novel became the leading form of literature in English. Most writers were now more concerned to meet the tastes of a large middle class reading public than to please aristocratic patrons. The best known works of the era include the emotionally powerful works of the Brontë sisters; the satire Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray; the realist novels of George Eliot; and Anthony Trollope's insightful portrayals of the lives of the landowning and professional classes.
Charles Dickens emerged on the literary scene in the 1830s, confirming the trend for serial publication. Dickens wrote vividly about London life and the struggles of the poor, but in a good-humoured fashion which was acceptable to readers of all classes. His early works such as the Pickwick Papers are masterpieces of comedy. Later his works became darker, without losing his genius for caricature.
An interest in rural matters and the changing social and economic situation of the countryside may be seen in the novels of Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, and others.
Leading poetic figures included Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Christina Rossetti.
Literature for children developed as a separate genre. Some works become globally well-known, such as those of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, both of whom used nonsense verse. Adventure novels, such as those of Anthony Hope and Robert Louis Stevenson, were written for adults but are now generally classified as for children.
[] Modernism
Main article: Modernist literature
First ion of Ulysses, James Joyce's masterpiece, and landmark of high modernism (1922).
The movement known as English literary modernism grew out of a general sense of disillusionment with Victorian era attitudes of certainty, conservatism, and objective truth. The movement was greatly influenced by the ideas of Romanticism, Karl Marx's political writings, and the psychoanalytic theories of subconscious - Sigmund Freud. The continental art movements of Impressionism, and later Cubism, were also important inspirations for modernist writers.
Although literary modernism reached its peak between the First and Second World Wars, the earliest examples of the movement's attitudes appeared in the mid to late nineteenth century. Gerard Manley Hopkins, A. E. Housman, and the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy represented a few of the major early modernists writing in England during the Victorian period.
The first decades of the twentieth century saw several major works of modernism published, including the seminal short story collection Dubliners by James Joyce, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and the poetry and drama of William Butler Yeats.
Important novelists between the World Wars included Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse and D. H. Lawrence. T. S. Eliot was the preeminent English poet of the period. Across the Atlantic writers like William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and the poets Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost developed a more American take on the modernist aesthetic in their work.
Perhaps the most contentiously important figure in the development of the modernist movement was the American poet Ezra Pound. Cred with "discovering" both T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, whose stream of consciousness novel Ulysses is considered to be one of the century's greatest literary achievements, Pound also advanced the cause of imagism and free verse, forms which would dominate English poetry into the twenty-first century.
Gertrude Stein, an American expat, was also an enormous literary force during this time period, famous for her line "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose."
Other notable writers of this period included H.D., Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, Vladimir Nabokov, William Carlos Williams, Ralph Ellison, Dylan Thomas, R.S. Thomas and Graham Greene. However, some of these writers are more closely associated with what has become known as post-modernism, a term often used to encompass the diverse range of writers who succeeded the modernists.
[] Post-modern literature
Main article: Postmodern literature
The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain tendencies in post-World War II literature. It is both a continuation of the experimentation championed by writers of the modernist period (relying heavily, for example, on fragmentation, paradox, questionable narrators, etc.) and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature. Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is difficult to define and there is little agreement on the exact characteristics, scope, and importance of postmodern literature. Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, Thomas Pynchon
[] Views of English literature
"I had always thought of English literature as the richest in the world; the discovery now of a secret chamber (sc. Old English literature) at the very threshold of that literature came to me as an additional gift." - Jorge Luis Borges, 'An Autobiographical Essay', The Aleph & Other Stories
[] See also
Indian English literature
Indian English Literature (IEL) refers to the body of work by writers in India who write in the English language and whose native or co-native language could be one of the numerous languages of India. It is also associated with the works of members of the Indian diaspora, especially people like Salman Rushdie who was born in India. It is frequently referred to as Indo-Anglian literature. (Indo-Anglian is a specific term in the sole context of writing that should not be confused with the term Anglo-Indian). As a category, this production comes under the broader realm of postcolonial literature- the production from previously colonised countries such as India.
IEL has a relatively recent history, it is only one and a half centuries old. The first book written by an Indian in English was by Sake Dean Mahomet, titled Travels of Dean Mahomet; Mahomet's travel narrative was published in 1793 in England. In its early stages it was influenced by the Western art form of the novel. Early Indian writers used English unadulterated by Indian words to convey an experience which was essentially Indian. Raja Rao's Kanthapura is Indian in terms of its storytelling qualities. Rabindranath Tagore wrote in Bengali and English and was responsible for the translations of his own work into English. Dhan Gopal Mukerji was the first Indian author to win a literary award in the United States. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, a writer of non-fiction, is best known for his The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian where he relates his life experiences and influences. P. Lal, a poet, translator, publisher and essayist, founded a press in the 1950s for Indian English writing, Writers Workshop.
R.K. Narayan is a writer who contributed over many decades and who continued to write till his death recently. He was discovered by Graham Greene in the sense that the latter helped him find a publisher in England. Graham Greene and Narayan remained close friends till the end. Similar to Thomas Hardy's Wessex, Narayan created the fictitious town of Malgudi where he set his novels. Some criticise Narayan for the parochial, detached and closed world that he created in the face of the changing conditions in India at the times in which the stories are set. Others, such as Graham Greene, however, feel that through Malgudi they could vividly understand the Indian experience. Narayan's evocation of small town life and its experiences through the eyes of the endearing child protagonist Swaminathan in Swami and Friends is a good sample of his writing style. Simultaneous with Narayan's pastoral idylls, a very different writer, Mulk Raj Anand, was similarly gaining recognition for his writing set in rural India; but his stories were harsher, and engaged, sometimes brutally, with divisions of caste, class and religion.
Later history
Among the later writers, the most notable is Salman Rushdie, born in India, now living in the United Kingdom. Rushdie with his famous work Midnight's Children (Booker Prize 1981, Booker of Bookers 1992) ushered in a new trend of writing. He used a hybrid language – English generously peppered with Indian terms – to convey a theme that could be seen as representing the vast canvas of India. He is usually categorised under the magic realism mode of writing most famously associated with Gabriel García Márquez.
Bharati Mukherjee, author of Jasmine (1989), has spent much of her career exploring issues involving immigration and identity with a particular focus upon the United States and Canada.
Vikram Seth, author of A Suitable Boy (1994) is a writer who uses a purer English and more realistic themes. Being a self-confessed fan of Jane Austen, his attention is on the story, its details and its twists and turns.
Shashi Tharoor, in his The Great Indian Novel (1989), follows a story-telling (though in a satirical) mode as in the Mahabharata drawing his ideas by going back and forth in time. His work as UN official living outside India has given him a vantage point that helps construct an objective Indianness.
Other authors include Anita Desai, Kiran Desai, Arundhati Roy, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Raj Kamal Jha, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharti Kirchner, Khushwant Singh, Amit Chaudhuri, Amitav Ghosh, Vikas Swarup, Rohinton Mistry, Kiran Nagarkar and C R Krishnan.
[] Debates
It would be useful at this point to bring in the recent debates on Indian Writing in English ("IWE").
One of the key issues raised in this context is the superiority/inferiority of IWE as opposed to the literary production in the various languages of India. Key polar concepts bandied in this context are superficial/authentic, imitative/creative, shallow/deep, critical/uncritical, elitist/parochial and so on.
The views of Rushdie and Amit Chaudhuri expressed through their books The Vintage Book of Indian Writing and The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature respectively essentialise this battle.
Rushdie's statement in his book – "the ironic proposition that India's best writing since independence may have been done in the language of the departed imperialists is simply too much for some folks to bear" – created a lot of resentment among many writers, including writers in English. In his book, Amit Chaudhuri questions – "Can it be true that Indian writing, that endlessly rich, complex and problematic entity, is to be represented by a handful of writers who write in English, who live in England or America and whom one might have met at a party?"
Chaudhuri feels that after Rushdie, IWE started employing magical realism, bagginess, non-linear narrative and hybrid language to sustain themes seen as microcosms of India and supposedly reflecting Indian conditions. He contrasts this with the works of earlier writers such as Narayan where the use of English is pure, but the deciphering of meaning needs cultural familiarity. He also feels that Indianness is a theme constructed only in IWE and does not articulate itself in the vernacular literatures. (It is probable that the level of Indianness constructed is directly proportional to the distance between the writer and India.) He further adds "the post-colonial novel, becomes a trope for an ideal hybridity by which the West celebrates not so much Indianness, whatever that infinitely complex thing is, but its own historical quest, its reinterpretation of itself".
Some of these arguments form an integral part of what is called postcolonial theory. The very categorisation of IWE – as IWE or under post-colonial literature – is seen by some as limiting. Amitav Ghosh made his views on this very clear by refusing to accept the Eurasian Commonwealth Writers Prize for his book The Glass Palace in 2001 and withdrawing it from the subsequent stage.
The renowned writer V. S. Naipaul, a third generation Indian from Trinidad and Tobago and a Nobel prize laureate, is a person who belongs to the world and usually not classified under IWE. Naipaul evokes ideas of homeland, rootlessness and his own personal feelings towards India in many of his books.
Jhumpa Lahiri, a Pulitzer prize winner from the U.S., is a writer uncomfortable under the label of IWE.
Recent writers in India such as Arundhati Roy and David Davidar show a direction towards contextuality and rootedness in their works. Arundhati Roy, a trained architect and the 1997 Booker prize winner for her The God of Small Things, calls herself a "home grown" writer. Her award winning book is set in the immensely physical landscape of Kerala. Davidar sets his The House of Blue Mangoes in Southern Tamil Nadu. In both the books, geography and politics are integral to the narrative. In his novel Lament of Mohini [1] (2000), Shreekumar Varma [2] touches upon the unique matriarchal system and the sammandham system of marriage as he writes about the Namboodiris and the aristocrats of Kerala.
As the number of Indian writers in English keeps increasing, with everyone with a story to tell trying to tell a story, and as publishing houses in India vie among themselves to discover the next new whiz-kid who will land up with world fame, it could become increasingly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Research, debates and seminars on IWE continue with increasing frequency. However,it might be too early a stage in the history of Indian writing in English to pass any final judgement.
[] Poetry
a humorous critique of early Indian English poetry.
A much over-looked category of Indian writing in English is poetry. As stated above, Rabindranath Tagore wrote in Bengali and English and was responsible for the translations of his own work into English. Other early notable poets in English include Derozio, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Joseph Furtado, Armando Menezes, Toru Dutt, Romesh Chandra Dutt, Sarojini Naidu and her brother Harendranath Chattopadhyaya.
In modern times, Indian poetry in English was typified by two very different poets. Dom Moraes, winner of the Hawthornden Prize at the precocious age of 19 for his first book of poems "A Beginning" went on to occupy a pre-eminent position among Indian poets writing in English. Nissim Ezekiel, who came from India's tiny Bene Israel Jewish community, created a voice and place for Indian poets writing in English and championed their work.
Their contemporaries in English poetry in India were Arvind Mehrotra, Jayanta Mahapatra, Gieve Patel, A. K. Ramanujan, Rajagopal Parthasarathy, Keki Daruwala, Adil Jussawala, Arun Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre, Eunice De Souza, Kersi Katrak, P. Lal and Kamala Das among several others.
A generation of exiles also sprang from the Indian diaspora. Among these are names like Agha Shahid Ali, Sujata Bhatt, Melanie Silgardo and Vikram Seth.
[] Indo-Nostalgic writing
Indo-Nostalgic writing is a somewhat loosely defined term encompassing writings, in the English language, wherein nostalgia regarding the Indian subcontinent, typically regarding India, represent a dominant theme or strong undercurrent. The writings may be memoirs, or quasi-fictionalized memoirs, travelogues, or inspired in part by real-life experiences and in part by the writer's imagination. This would include both mass-distributed "Indo-Anglian" literature put out by major publishing houses and also much shorter articles (e.g. feature pieces in mainstream or literary magazines) or poetry, including material published initially or solely in webzines.
Certainly, Indo-Nostalgic writings have much overlap with post-colonial literature but are generally not about 'heavy' topics such as cultural identity, conflicted identities, multilingualism or rootlessness. The writings are often less self-conscious and more light-hearted, perhaps dealing with impressionistic memories of places, people, cuisines, Only-in-India situations, or simply vignettes of "the way things were". Of late, a few Indo-nostalgic writers are beginning to show signs of "long-distance nationalism", concomitant with the rise of nationalism within India against the backdrop of a booming economy.
In addition to focusing on nationalism or any universal themes, many writers emerged out with innovative ideas and techniques in writing poetry. It is a pity that there are many writers whose writings still remain unnoticed either due to lack of source to get their works recoganised or less opportunities does not knock the doors of the right person. Writers like Krishna Srinivas, M.K.Gopinathan, etc have contributed enormous poetry collection to the growth of Indian English Literature. Krishna Srinivas concentrated on all sorts of social aspects in his poetry, and M.K.Gopinathan poetic mission is to spread peace in the minds of the readers. M.K.Gopinathan's anthologies includes, "I go on for ever", "A Fresh Rose" and "It is not my fault" which contained interesting subjects of day to day life.
Typically, the authors are either Western-based writers of Indian origin (e.g. Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry), or Western writers who have spent long periods of time in the subcontinent, possibly having been born or raised in India, perhaps as the children of British Raj-era European expatriates or missionaries (e.g. Jim Corbett, Stephen Alter). Or, they may even be Anglo-Indians who have emigrated from the subcontinent to the West. Third Culture Kids (TCKs) often grow up to produce Indo-Nostalgic writings that exhibit palpably deep (and perhaps somewhat romanticized) feelings for their childhoods in the subcontinent. Accordingly, another common theme in Indo-Nostalgic writing is "rediscovery" or its cousin, "reconnection".
Of course, for mass-distributed authors, Indo-Nostalgic writings may not necessarily represent all of their literary output, but certainly would represent a high percentage; it is their sweet spot, after all. Finally, it is worth noting that the markets for such writers are almost entirely in the West; despite the rapid growth in the incomes of urban Indians, the sales of English-language literature within India (other than books required for educational degrees or professional purposes) are minuscule compared to sales in the West, even if one includes pirated copies.
===================================
Keep in touch with this blog for more material on this subject
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)