Film criticism

The texts we will focus on are Walter Benjamin's essay, The Task of The Translator, and Paul De Man's commentary on it. Benjamin. During the period of Romanticism, translation was divided into two sorts : creative, and mechanical. It was also the industrial revolution and Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), like many translators, was really fond of mechanical translations. This German philosopher wrote The Task of The Translator in 1923, as an introduction to his translation of Baudelaire, Tableaux…

There are several theories on the reading process and these different theories give different set of controls to the reader. But one thing is evident that there is no denying that the reader plays a role greater or equal to that of the author in realizing a text. Wolfgang Iser in his essay 'The Reading Process- a phenomenological approach' talks about how a text stays a text and doesn’t become a literary work until someone reads it. He talks about several parts of a work that remain blank until…

TASK 1 : ESSAY Discuss the application of relevant theories of literary criticism in the selected text. Literary criticism from my point of view can be defined as the art or practice of judging and commenting on the qualities and characteristics of various literary works. Modern critics tend to pass down the concerns of earlier centuries, such as formal categories or the place of moral or aesthetic value. Some analyse texts as self-contained entities, in segregation from external factors,…

Emerson’s argument, like that of many authors in The Norton Anthology, centers around the nature of the Poet; what they are and what they are not. The argument for the nature of the Poet as a sort of translator for humanity provides the basis for Emerson’s essay. Starting out, he states that The Poet “sees and handles that which others dream of” and imparts it to the rest of humanity (Emerson 621). The nature of the Poet is representative, he is attuned to something the common man is not, and…

Wolfgang Iser’s essay The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach, delineates the author-reader relationship in completion of a literary work, where the author plays the ‘artistic’ role, which is that of the creator of the text, and the reader plays the ‘aesthetic’ role, which, he mentions is the process of the ‘realization’ of the text . (Iser 279) He refers to Roman Ingarden’s “Intentionale Satzkorrelate” (Intentional sentence correlatives), where the interaction of the otherwise…

The short story chosen was taken from the book titled Malaysian Short Stories (Fernando, L. (Ed.), 2005). I chose to write on K.S. Maniam’s short story- The Dream of Vasantha. The Dream Of Vasantha depicts a hardworking widow and her dream of seeing her son be a humble yet successful person. Maniam plotted the story with an introduction of Vasantha’s daily routine of washing clothes at the houses of Mr. Pillai and Mr. Ganda Singh. Vasantha reminisces the death of her husband too. As Vasantha…

Amit Chaudhuri is a versatile writer of contemporary Indian English Literature. He depicts domestic life, gender roles and social relations. His works reflect the Indian values and Bengali sensibility. Chaudhuri’sFreedom Song is about the family afflicted by old age. The young people are doing all kinds of things that are perceived as idiosyncratic. It deals with ordinary people’s consciousness. The old couple, Khuku and Shib live in Calcutta. The novel chronicles the lives of Bhola and his…

There is currently a growing body of research in postcolonial criticism and analysis of Renaissance literature. Inspired by efforts to decolonize the canon, I am interested in studying the roots of colonialism in the Renaissance and its influence on the modern world. In my second year of undergraduate study, I was introduced to postcolonial literature and theory in an introductory course with Dr. Stanka Radović. Reading polemic texts, as well as ‘subalterns’ writing back or breaking away from…

My initial experience with being a reader began with a Dr. Seuss book when I was a very young boy, a colorful book with walking-talking cats and dogs, treehouses, and a party. I am not incredibly confident that I indeed am able of correctly recalling the details of the book that got read to me or by me when no one else would just about every day for what might have been a whole year or just a few short months of obsession, either way the memory of reading that Dr. Seuss book stuck in such a way…

In her scholarly article “Why I’m Still Writing Women’s Literary History”, Professor Devoney Looser astutely asserts that women’s literary history is a field that is alive and thriving and therefore deserves to be treated as such. Her argument centers around addressing concerns expressed by various colleagues of hers that the academic field of women’s studies is now “passe” due to taking a “separatist” approach. Looser explicitly states that her article is therefore “a credo that has its origins…