English Cosmos by Dr Mukesh Pareek

Budhan Theatre Founded in 1998,  Budhan Theatre  is an Indian theatre group composed of members of the Chhara tribe, one of India's groups of  denotified  or  "criminal"  tribal people in  Ahmedabad ,  Gujarat .The Budhan Theatre was founded by Prof. Ganesh Devy  G. N. Devy , a renown linguist and professor of English Literature and Smt. Mahasweta Devi  Mahasweta Devi  a noted Bangla writer and Magsaysay awardee. The style of theatre practiced by the theatre troupe is theatre for community development and theatre for social change. They perform street play, Intimate theatre and other experimental theatres to raise awareness about discrimination and violence faced by Chharas and other denotified tribal people in India. Their influences include the  Indian People's Theatre Association ,  Bertoldt Brecht , and the Indian aesthetic of  Rasa . Budhan Theatre takes its name from Budhan Sabar, a tribal man who was labeled a ...

Baby Kamble  (1929-2012) was an Indian activist and writer. She was born into an untouchable caste, Mahar, one of the largest untouchable communities in Maharashtra. She was a well-known  Dalit  activist and writer who was inspired by  B. R. Ambedkar . Kamble and her family converted to Buddhism and remained lifelong practicing Buddhists. In her community, she came to be admired as a writer and was fondly called as  Tai  (meaning sister). She is widely remembered and loved by the Dalit community for her contributions of powerful literary and activist work. She is one of the earliest women writers from the untouchable communities whose distinctive reflexive style of feminist writing setting her apart from other Dalit writers and upper caste women writers (Ramteke,n.d). who gaze was limited and reflexivity incarcerated in caste and masculinity. Kamble is critically acclaimed and known her autobiographical work  Jina Amucha , written in  Marathi...

A Sonnet is a Moment's Monument by  Dante Gabriel Rossetti A Sonnet is a moment's monument,-- Memorial from the Soul's eternity To one dead deathless hour. Whether for lustral rite or dire portent, Of its own arduous fullness reverent: Carve it in ivory or in ebony, As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see Its flowering crest impearled and orient. A Sonnet is a coin: its face reveals The soul--its converse, to what Power 'tis due: Whether for tribute to the august appeals Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue, It serve; or, 'mid the dark wharf's cavernous breath, In Charon's palm it pay the toll to Death.

The Hairy Ape ,  a play by Eugene O’Neill, is about the negative effects of industrialization. A crew of firemen are drinking on the forecastle of a ship. Though they seem happy, there is tension between them, as though they might erupt into a brawl at any moment. The men sing—sometimes about alcohol and sometimes about home; Yank verbally attacks the idea of home, women, and emotional involvement. Long lays the blame for their miserable lot in life on those in first-class, which he identifies as the capitalist class. Yank says the workers are better than them. Paddy launches into a bout of nostalgia for the days before engines, when, according to him, the ship, the sea, and man united as one. Yank tells him he is crazy—and dead. He thinks of Paddy as a relic of an age gone by, and says that he is steel. Meanwhile, on the promenade deck, Mildred Douglas endures her aunt’s chiding as they chat and recline in the deck chairs. Her aunt teases her about Mildred’s attempts to help the p...

Dissatisfied with life in her rural  Wisconsin  home, 18-year-old Caroline "Sister Carrie" Meeber takes the train to  Chicago , where her older sister Minnie, and Minnie's husband, Sven Hanson, have agreed to take her in. On the train, Carrie meets Charles Drouet, a traveling salesman, who is attracted to her because of her simple beauty and unspoiled manner. They exchange contact information, but upon discovering the "steady round of toil" and somber atmosphere at her sister's flat, she writes to Drouet and discourages him from calling on her there. Carrie soon embarks on a quest for work to pay rent to her sister and her husband, and takes a job running a machine in a shoe factory. Before long, however, she is shocked by the coarse manners of both the male and female factory workers, and the physical demands of the job, as well as the squalid factory conditions, begin to take their toll. She also senses Minnie and Sven's disapproval of her interest in ...

In the 1920s, twenty-year-old Lena Grove hitches a wagon ride to Jefferson, Mississippi. She's pregnant and in search of Lucas Burch, the father of her baby. On the way into town, the house of a town outcast, Joanna Burden, is on fire. Lena eventually learns that there is no one in Jefferson named Burch, but that there  is  a fellow named Byron Bunch. Bunch, a worker at the local planing mill, talks to Lena, telling her stories about a stranger in town named Joe Brown. Once Byron confirms that Joe Brown has a white scar on his face, Lena knows that this Joe Brown is the father of her baby, so she settles into town to try to find him. But Byron falls in love with Lena right after meeting her, and vows (to himself and the local Reverend Hightower) to protect her and see her through the pregnancy, with or without this Joe Brown fellow. Through flashback, the narrator recounts the lives of Joe Christmas and Reverend Hightower. Joe Christmas was dropped off at an orphanage on Chris...

Yoknapatawpha County  (pronounced  [jɒknəpəˈtɔfə] ) is a  fictional Mississippi county  created by the American author  William Faulkner , based upon and inspired by  Lafayette County, Mississippi , and its county seat of  Oxford, Mississippi  (which Faulkner renamed Jefferson). Faulkner often referred to Yoknapatawpha County as "my apocryphal county". From  Sartoris  onwards, Faulkner set all but three of his novels in the county ( Pylon ,  The Wild Palms  and  A Fable  were set elsewhere), as well as over 50 of his stories. Absalom, Absalom!  includes a map of Yoknapatawpha County drawn by Faulkner. The word  Yoknapatawpha  is derived from two  Chickasaw  words— Yocona  and  petopha , meaning "split land". Faulkner said to a  University of Virginia  audience that the compound means "water flows slow through flat land".  Yoknapatawpha  was the original name for t...

Literary Devices Definition and Examples of Literary Terms Aporia Definition of Aporia Aporia is a  figure of speech  wherein a  speaker purports or expresses doubt or perplexity regarding a question (often feigned), and asks the  audience  how he ought to proceed. The doubts may appear as rhetorical questions, often in the beginning of the text. Aporia is a logical  paradox  in which the speaker sows seeds of doubt on a  subject . This rhetorical strategy can make the audience feel sympathetic toward the speaker regarding the  dilemma  he is in. Features of Aporia Aporia is used as a rhetorical device in literature.It is also called “dubitation,” which means that the uncertainty is always untruthful.It could be a question or a statement.It is often used in philosophy. It relates to philosophical questions and subjects which have no obvious answers.Plato and Socrates were well-known for using aporia. Examples of Apor...

Birches BY  ROBERT FROST When I see birches bend to left and right Across the lines of straighter darker trees, I like to think some boy's been swinging them. But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning After a rain. They click upon themselves As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel. Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust— Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen. They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load, And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed So low for long, they never right themselves: You may see their trunks arching in the woods Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair Before them over their heads to dry in the sun. ...

Emotional blackmail is a term coined by psychotherapist Susan Forward, about controlling people in relationships and the theory that  fear ,  obligation , and  guilt  (FOG) are the transactional dynamics at play between the controller and the person being controlled. Understanding these dynamics are useful to anyone trying to extricate from the  controlling behavior  of another person, and deal with their own compulsions to do things that are uncomfortable, undesirable, burdensome, or self-sacrificing for others. Forward and Frazier identify four blackmail types each with their own  mental manipulation  style: Type Example Punisher's threat Eat the food I cooked for you or I'll hurt you. Self-punisher's threat Eat the food I cooked for you or I'll hurt myself. Sufferer's threat Eat the food I cooked for you. I was saving it for myself. I wonder what will happen now. Tantalizer's threat Eat the food I cooked for you and you just may get ...

Passage to India Walt Whitman  - 1819-1892 1 Singing my days,   Singing the great achievements of the present,   Singing the strong light works of engineers,   Our modern wonders, (the antique ponderous Seven outvied,)   In the Old World the east the Suez canal, The New by its mighty railroad spann’d,   The seas inlaid with eloquent gentle wires;   Yet first to sound, and ever sound, the cry with thee O soul,    The Past! the Past! the Past!      The Past— the dark unfathom’d retrospect! The teeming gulf—the sleepers and the shadows!   The past—the infinite greatness of the past!   For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?   (As a projectile, form’d, impell’d, passing a certain line, still keeps on,    So the present, utterly form’d, impell’d by the past.) ...

Gender Discrimination in the Indian Society Gender disparity still exists in India. Being born as women in the Indian society one has to face gender discrimination at all levels. At the household level - females are confined to the bounds of their household chores, raising children and looking after families, irrespective of her education degrees or her job profile. At her workplace: women have limited access to job opportunities and are paid less for the same work. Education and learning opportunities: gender-wise literacy rates in India showcase the wide gap that exists between men and women. As per 2011 census data, effective literacy rates (age 7 and above) were 82.14% for men and 65.46% for women. The main reason behind parents unwilling to spend on girl’s education is the mindset that educating women is of no value as in the future they will only serve their husbands and the in- laws. The Indian constitution provides equal rights and privileges for both men and women but ...

Reification Georg Lukács  uses the concept of reification (from the Latin ‘res facere’, literally ‘to make a thing’) to describe that people’s ‘own activity, [their] own labour becomes something objective and independent of [them]’ (from his ‘ Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat ’, sec. I.1). For him, this phenomenon has two sides: (1) people fail to see that certain social structures, ‘relation[s] between people’ ( ibid. ), are established and sustained only by their own actions (classical social constructionism focuses on this side); (2) thereby the bond between the product and the producer is broken, the social relations that are embodied into the product by virtue of the process of production now appear as if they were natural properties, in other words, something abstract, the implicit assumptions on which these relations are based, now appears as concrete (the older  Frankfurt School...