Assignment #28: How to define literature For the Departments of English & Media Studies by Prof Dr Sohail Ansari

دعوت و تحریک

ادب کی قوت اور اسلامی تحریک

ڈاکٹر شاہ رشاد عثمانی

ادب، تحریک اور اسلام کے باہمی تعلق اور تقاضوں پر اظہار خیال سے پہلے ان سوالوں پر غور کرلینا مناسب ہوگا: ادب کیا ہے؟ فرد و معاشرے اور زندگی سے اُس کا کیا تعلق ہے؟
٭ ادب : ہمارے خیال میں ادب کی کوئی منطقی تعریف نہیں کی جاسکتی۔ اگر ایک طرف ادب کو وقت اور زمانے کا آئینہ کہا جاسکتا ہے تو ساتھ ہی ساتھ اسے ہم حُسن ِکلام اور تاثیرِ کلام کے نام سے بھی تعبیر کرسکتے ہیں۔ دراصل ادب نام ہے احساسات کو لفظوں میں ڈھالنے کا، جذبات کو مترنم پیکر عطا کرنے کا، تصوّرات کو قابل فہم اشاروں میں تبدیل کرنے کا۔ ادب انسانی زندگی کا حسین ترجمان، اس کے افکار کا پر تو اور اس کے خیالات کا عکس ہوتا ہے۔ادب زندگی سے پیدا ہوتا ہے، زندگی کی ترجمانی کرتا ہے، اور زندگی ہی کے کام آتا ہے۔یہ ناممکن ہے کہ کسی معاشرے کا ادیب اپنے آپ کو معاشرے سے خارج یا لاتعلق رکھ کے ادب پیش کرے، یا یہ کہ جو کچھ وہ پیش کرے وہ دوسروں پر اثر انداز نہ ہو۔ مراد یہ ہے کہ وہ ادب ہی نہیں جو معاشرے اور اس میں رہنے والے فرد اور اس کی زندگی کو اپنے مخصوص رنگ سے متاثر نہ کرے۔

Exercise

Form the definition of literature in the light of above lines.

Read quotes below and do exercise

A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.

Walter Scott

Exercise

Read one quote below and tell if this quote can help to understand what Walter Scott says and tell What roots and fruit mean in context

‘Literature without history is without roots and history without literature is without fruit’.

·       What is the difference between a mason and an architect?

·       What history and literature can contribute?

We believed that to understand literature, you had to understand its place in history and culture.

M. H. Abrams

Exercise

·       Why every department of English and Urdu contain the subject of History.

·       How the subject of History taught in the department of English and Urdu differs from the subject of History taught in the department of History.

·       Why the subject culture is not taught in the department of English and Urdu.

Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Exercise

Persian also known by its endonym Farsi and Arabic language are the sister to Urdu.

·       Neither is taught in schools do you think that our national memory is excised then? 

·       How intrusion of force can cut short literature?

·       Discuss the impact of colonial forces on Muslim literature particularly on literature produced in British India

We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.

T. S. Eliot

Exercise

·       Can we say that we know too little, so we can be convinced of too much?

·       ‘So is our religion’ mean

·       Can the poetry of Iqbal rebut Eliot?

Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts.

Philip Roth

Exercise

·       Explain in context:  Power. Authority. Audacity.

·       Philip has used in this quote one word in unique way that use makes it difficult to understand it as well. Find that word and explain it.

·       Philip has added one word to other word to give it a new meaning. Find it and explain

·       How far you agree with Philip that it is not important what literature inspires but that it inspires.

“It is not true that 'we have only one life to live'; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.” 
― S.I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action

In a real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read.

S.I. Hayakawa

Exercise

Read a quote below and tell if it relates to above quote or not?

·       ‘Language makes it possible to do in the field of imagination what is not possible in the field of experience’.

‘YOLO is the acronym of "you only live once". Along the same lines as the Latin "carpe diem" ("seize the day"), it is a call to live life to its fullest extent, even embracing behavior which carries inherent risk.

·       If a person can only live once so how he can have many more lives?

·       ‘Live more than people’ mean?

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Mao Zedong

Exercise

What art for art’s sake means?

Do you think art should stand above religion?

Do you think classical poetry is detached poetry?

Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.

A.   E. Housman

Exercise

·       Do not you think above quote seems absurd and self-contradictory.

·       By glorifying the acts of violence people achieve the paradoxical effect of making them trivial. Similarly in the above quote a writer glorifies the ………

·       Explain what Housman means by ‘Good’ in your own words

A good story, just like a good sentence, does more than one job at once. That's what literature is: a story that does more than tell a story, a story that manages to reflect in some way the multilayered texture of life itself.

Karen Thompson Walker

Exercise

·       Explain in context: ‘more than one job at once’ ‘more than tell a story’ multilayered texture of life itself’

Graphic novels are not traditional literature, but that does not mean they are second-rate. Images are a way of writing. When you have the talent to be able to write and to draw, it seems a shame to choose one. I think it's better to do both.

Marjane Satrapi

Exercise

Explain: ‘Graphic novels’  ‘Traditional literature’ ‘Both’

·       The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

Margaret Atwood

                                                                                       Exercise

·       If it is true then how to get questions?

·       How the answers of literature differ from the answers of political science or sociology?

·       How to pose question?

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

Boris Pasternak

Exercise

·       What can be extraordinary about ordinary people?

·       Give some example of ordinary words?

·       Give some examples of ordinary words saying extraordinary.

·       Give some examples of extraordinary words saying ordinary.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

Barbara W. Tuchman

Exercise

·       Define these words in the context of a quote: silent. Dumb. Crippled. Standstill.

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

Gao Xingjian

Exercise

·       Do you think ‘paradise lost’ had any mask?

·       When and why literature needs mask?

Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.

Anton Chekhov

Exercise

·       Why a writer has used lawful for medicine and mistress for literature?

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez 

Exercise

·      What is the material of literature and why it is hard like wood?

·       From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.

·       Jhumpa Lahiri

·       Exercise

·       Explain ‘The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels’

·       Explain ‘The tension between alienation and assimilation’

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

Ezra Pound

Exercise

·       Write any sentence, slogan, or any passage that is charged with meaning

‘Literature is the question minus the answer’

Roland Barthes
Exercise

·       What question means in context?

·       Why literature is minus the answer?

·       What answer means in context?

Caribbean literature only has to be true to itself. It doesn't need colonialism or imperialism. It's always been vibrant.

Marlon James

Exercise

·       Every Literature is to be true to itself, and for that an author is to be true to himself. Explain.

·       Does a literature need a catalyst? 

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

 Gilbert K. Chesterton

Exercise

·       How a part can be different from whole. Everything is a sum of its parts.

·       What is the difference between a luxury and a necessity?

Without knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated

Thomas Bulfinch

Exercise

·       Do you think what Thomas says can be more relevant to Hindu Literature and folk literature but not to Islamic or Marxist literature?

When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man's name live for thousands of years.

Denis Diderot

Exercise

·       If Denis is right then how to explain ‘It is a paradox that many comedians have a painful and sad lives’

·       They are on a level’ which level and how to achieve that level.

·       What achievements mean

I was chemistry major, but I'm always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I've brought scientific thinking to literature. There's been very little gratitude for this.

Kurt Vonnegut

Exercise

·       What difference scientific thinking can make?

·       If there were a great gratitude so it would be for what

·       Do you think scientific thinking can produce studied writing? Not uninhibited and spontaneous ones

J. A. Cuddon writes:

 In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode or method that attempts "to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind" of a narrator

Joanne Winning  says:

The term was coined by William James in 1890 in his The Principles of Psychology, and in 1918 the novelist May Sinclair (1863–1946) first applied the term stream of consciousness, in a literary context, when discussing Dorothy Richardson's (1873–1957) novels. Pointed Roofs (1915), the first work in Richardson's series of 13 semi-autobiographical novels titled Pilgrimage is the first complete stream of consciousness novel published in English. However, in 1934, Richardson comments that "Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf & D.R. ... were all using 'the new method', though very differently, simultaneously" as described in a letter to the bookseller and publisher by Sylvia Beach.

The term "stream of consciousness" was coined by philosopher and psychologist William James in The Principles of Psychology (1890):

Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself as chopped up in bits ... it is nothing joined; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let's call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life

Exercise

·       What Kurt Vonnegut may say having read stream of consciousness

Exercise

What does ‘same but different’ means?

·       Can we say all quotes are same but different

Suppose we take a different meaning of above expression, then:

·       Explain the same and different in terms of meaning

·       Find any two quotes those are mutually exclusive