M Ali's English Literature Notes

The Bluest Eye is the story of a young African American girl and her family who are affected in every direction by the dominant American culture that says to them, "You're not beautiful; you're not relevant; you're invisible; you don't even count." Here, Paul C. Taylor argues, “a whitedominated culture has racialised beauty, [in] that it has defined beauty per se in terms of white beauty,” (Taylor, 1999, 17) Morrison, an Afro-American woman writer, challenges in the novel the Western standards of beauty and demonstrates that the concept of beauty is socially constructed. Morrison shows that the value of blackness is diminished and this novel works to subvert that tendency. In the novel, there is an obvious hierarchy, distinction drawn among the rich white, poor white, (and) the rich black and poor black families. Morrison shows how the novel's black characters have been affected in some way by the white media, by the white standard of beau...

D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, besides having been analyzed for its complex psychological relationship and autobiographical elements, mainly stresses on a social aspect: class consciousness, social and monetary aspirations and the quest for upward mobility seemed to be very much on the minds of Lawrence and his fictional characters, much as these priorities dominate thinking in contemporary America . Lawrence ’s significant parallels between characters and narrative techniques, as Helen Baron in his introduction to Sons and Lovers states, “Powerfully intensify the characters’ consciousness of each other and of their surroundings.”(p.xv)         Gertrude bears a strong class-consciousness in her. She had a relationship with John, a man of her same class with much property, but he betrayed her by marrying a woman of forty for property. However, she finds in Walter Morel something different that she could not find in her previously known persons; and a str...

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is one of the most discussed and controversial texts in postcolonial study. It shows the nature and effect of European colonialism in Africa . At the same time, it attacks the colonizers as well, though Conrad can not escape the attack of some post colonial critics like Chinua Achebe for his “dehumanizing” the Africans. Almost all the characters in Marlow's tale take part in the colonialist enterprise for selfish purposes. The narrator expresses that the target of the colonial expedition in different times has been Congo , the heart of darkness which has been the mission for many Europeans “bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire” Here the symbols "the sword" and "the torch” refer to brutal forces colonial enterprise and to the negation of the native culture by the so called light of civilization.           Marlow's a...

Time is an eternal phenomenon in The Waste Land. The Waste Land considers the relationship between life in time, a life of bondage and suffering, and life in eternity. Time is the expression of the timeless in the phenomenal world and eternity pervades every changing element of temporal existence. At the very opening, Eliot has used the epigraph of the poem from Petronius, "I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in her cage, and when the boys said, Sibyl, what do you want? she replied I want to die." Sybil is a symbol of timeless time since she is suspended  in jar and she can not die, still she is ageing. On the other hand she is captured in human’s time trap showing how time decays youth. Sybil is associated with the eternal cycle of birth, death and re-birth. However, the Sibyl’s predicament mirrors what Eliot sees as his own: He lives in a culture that has decayed and withered but will not expire, and he is forced to live with reminders of its ...

Shakespeare’s use of witches in his famous play Macbeth is indeed a common contemporary theatrical device of the time. However, he reaches the situation and the characters to such a psychological state that we are somehow convinced at the rationality of the irrationality of the witches. They have been used to lessen the responsibility of the hero’s killing a legitimate, old and virtuous king, King Duncan. In order to misguide the hero, Macbeth who has been presented at first as brave, noble, gentle, loyal to the king and loved by all,  Shakespeare here applies, a device, the witches whose task is to misguide and confuse people and distort reality. To them, Fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air. They call Macbeth the “thane of Glamis” which he already possess, and the future “thane of Cawdor” and the king hereafter. Next when he, having returned from a victorious battlefield, is informed the king’s reward to him the “thane of Cawdor ”, h...

Though not a major character, Caliban in The Tempest has become a central attention of the critics and readers of recent post colonial studies , as Richard P Wheeler ( 2001: 320) comments, Many recent readings have rigorously emphasized the importance of the play’s relation to the colonialist enterprise. (p.320) Hence, Caliban is the primary source of evaluating the nature of European colonialism, because Caliban is presented here as a symbol of a colonized native. The name of Prospero’s servant-monster, Caliban, seems to be an anagram or derivative of “Cannibal.”. In The Tempest , Caliban suffers the same fate as many New World natives: He loses control over a domain he thought he ruled, becoming a virtual slave of Prospero: As I told thee before, I am subject to a tyrant, a sorcerer, that by his cunning hath cheated me of the island. (III, 2) Almost all of the “colonizers” on the island treat Caliban, the native, as “savage” and a type of meanest creature. P...

"What do I know about man's destiny?  I could tell you more about radishes." -Samuel Beckett Theater of the Absurd came about as a reaction to World War II.  It took the basis of existential philosophy and combined it with dramatic elements to create a style of theatre which presented a world which can not be logically explained, life is in one word, ABSURD! Thus, The Theatre of the Absurd is a designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction…as well as to the style of theatre which has evolved from their work. (wikipedia) Needless to say, this genre of theatre took quite some time to catch on because it used techniques that seemed to be illogical to the theatre world.  The plots often deviated from the more traditional episodic structure, and seem to move in a circle, ending the same way it began.  The scenery was often unrecognizable, and to make matters worse, the dialogue never seemed to make any sense. The “Theatre of the Absurd” is a ter...