English Cosmos by Dr Mukesh Pareek

Top 10 books about the British in India 1.  Kim by Rudyard Kipling  (1900) If you ask any Indian writer which English book about India has meant most to them, the chances are they will say Kim .  Yet it is an odd choice, this rambling story about an Irish vagabond orphan who is taken up by the British secret service and conscripted into the Great Game of repelling Russian influence in the Himalayas. But then Kim   is a very odd book weaving together Buddhism and espionage, the colourful life of the bazaar and the Grand Trunk Road. Because it doesn’t exactly lead anywhere, it goes everywhere. It’s a children’s classic for grown-ups who are wide awake enough to get it. 2.  White Mughals by William Dalrymple (2003) Before the memsahibs came, lonely British officers consoled themselves with their Indian  bibis . Some they abused and then deserted, but others they married and raised families with in those easy-going early days before the R...

Summary of SULA The Bottom is a mostly black neighborhood in  Ohio . A white farmer promised freedom and a piece of Bottom land to his slave if he would perform some very difficult chores. When the slave completed the work, he asked the farmer to keep his end of the bargain. Freedom was easy, the farmer had no objection to that, but he didn't want to give up any land, so he told the slave that he was very sorry that he had to give him valley land. He had hoped to give him a piece of the bottom land. The slave blinked and said he thought valley land was bottom land. The master said, "Oh no! See those hills? That's bottom land; rich and fertile." Shadrack, a resident of the Bottom, fought in  World War I . He returns a shattered man, unable to accept the complexities of the world. He lives on the outskirts of town, attempting to create order in his life. One of his methods involves compartmentalizing his fear of death in a ritual he invents and names National Suicide ...

Contrapuntal Reading or Analysis By looking at a novel contrapuntally, we take into account intertwined histories and perspectives. Specifically, contrapuntal analysis, developed by Edward W. Said, is used in interpreting colonial texts, considering the perspectives of both the colonizer and the colonized. This approach is not only helpful but also necessary in making important connections in a novel. If one does not read with the right background, one may miss the weight behind the presence of Antigua in  Mansfield Park , Australia in  Great Expectations , or India in  Vanity Fair . Interpreting contrapuntally is interpreting different perspectives simultaneously and seeing how the text interacts with itself as well as with historical or biographical contexts. It is reading with "awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts" (Said 51). Since what isn't said ...

Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen: Summary and Critical Analysis Anthem for Doomed Youth, as the title suggests, is a poem about the waste of many young men in the First World War. The word ‘anthem’ in the title, unlike a national anthem that glorifies a country, is ironical, for there is just the opposite of glory in the absurd death of younger people shooting each other for nothing. The youth in the poem is doomed less by other (which the poem doesn’t mention) than by his own decision to join the war. The poem reminds us of the sonnet that Mr. Brooke wrote to glorify war and England in that jingoistic manner; Owen has used the same sonnet form (that was originally used to express love) to demystify the conventional glorification of war, by exposing the meanness and absurdity of dying in the battle. The poem is written in the form of a sonnet. The poem as a whole is about how to conduct the funeral of a certain (or any) soldier who has died in war. The first...

Cultural materialism (cultural studies) Cultural materialism  in  literary theory  and  cultural studies  traces its origin to the work of the  left-wing  literary critic  Raymond Williams . Cultural materialism makes analysis based in  critical theory , in the tradition of the  Frankfurt School . It emerged as a theoretical movement in the early 1980s along with  new historicism , an American approach to  early modern  literature, with which it shares much common ground. The term was coined by Williams, who used it to describe a theoretical blending of leftist culturalism and  Marxist  analysis. Cultural materialists deal with specific historical documents and attempt to analyze and recreate the zeitgeist of a particular moment in history. Williams viewed culture as a "productive process", part of the  means of production , and cultural materialism often identifies what he called "residual", "emergent" ...