Second Language Acquisition

Topic :- Second Language Acquisition

Name :- Chauhan Sejal Arunbhai

Subject :- English Language Teaching-1

Paper :- 12

Roll No :-

M.A. PART-II SEM-III

Year- 2013-15

  Submitted to :-

Smt.S.B.Gardi

Department of English

M.K.Bhavnagar University.

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

           As we know that the term Second language acquisition refers to the processes through which someone acquires one or more second or foreign language. SLA researchers look at acquisition in naturalistic contexts and in classroom setting. Researchers are interested in both Product and Process. Here we give trace the development of SLA from its origins in contrastive analysis. This is followed by a selective review of research, focusing on product-oriented studies of stages that learners pass through as they acquire another language, as well as investigations into the processes underlying acquisition. The practical implications of research are then discussed, followed by a review of current and future trends and directions.

               Let’s have look on background. The discipline now known as SLA emerged from comparative studies of similarities and differences between languages. These studies were conducted in the belief that a learner’s first language(L1) has an important influence on the acquisition of a second(L2), resulting in the ‘contrastive analysis’(CA) hypothesis. Proponents of contrastive analysis argued that where L1 and L2 rules are in conflict, errors are likely to occur which are the result of ‘interference’ between L1 and L2. For example, the hypothesis predicted that Spanish L1 learners would tend, when learning English, to place the adjective after the noun as is done in Spanish, rather than before it. Such an error can be explained as ‘negative transfer’ of the L1 rule to the L2. When the rules are similar for both languages; ‘positive transfer’ would occur and language learning would be facilitated. Where a target language feature does not exist in the L1, learning would also be impeded.

               Thus, English L1 learners will encounter difficulty trying to master the use of nominal classifiers in certain Asian languages such as Cantonese, because these do not exist in English. In terms of pedagogy, contrastivists held that learners difficulties in learning an L2 could be predicted on the basis of a systematic comparison of the two languages and that learners from different first language backgrounds would experience different difficulties when attempting to learn a common L2.

               The CA hypothesis was in harmony with the prevailing psychological theory of the time: behaviourism. Behaviourists believed that learning was a process of habit formation Linguistic habits acquired by individuals as their L1 emerged would have a marked influence on their L2 acquisition. It is no coincidence that research questioning the contrastivists position emerged at about the same time as cognitive psychologists began to challenge behaviourism.   

              A major shift in perspective occurred in the 1960s, when linguists and language educators turned their attention from the CA of languages and began studying the specific language learners  used as they attempted to communicate in the target language. In an important publication, Corder made a strong case for the investigation of learners errors as a way of obtaining insights into the processes and strategies underlying SLA. Errors were seen not as evidence of pathology on the part of learners but as a normal and healthy part of the learning process.

              The systematic study of learners errors revealed interesting insights into SLA process. First, learners made errors that were not predicted by the CA hypothesis. Second, the errors that learners made were systematic, rather than random. Third, learners appeared to move through a series of stages as they developed competence in the target language. These successive stages were characterized by particular type of error, and each stage could be seen as a kind of interlanguage or ‘interim language’ in its own right.

              Not surprisingly, the field of SLA has been strongly influence by L1 acquisition SLA researchers have looked to L1 acquisition for insights into ways of investigating the acquisition process as well as the outcomes of the research. Particularly influential was a pioneering study by Brown, who conducted a longitudinal case study of three children acquiring English as an L1. Brown traced the development of 14 grammatical structures discovering that contrary to expectations, there was no relationship between that order in which items were acquired and the frequency with which they were used by the parents.

Product Oriented Research:-

During the early 1970s a series of empirical investigations into learner language were carried out which became known as the ‘morpheme order’ studies. Their principal aim was to determine whether there is a ‘natural’ sequence in the order in which L2 learners acquire the grammar of the target language. Dulay and Burt the principal architects of the morpheme order studies found that, like their L1 counterparts, children acquiring an L2 appeared to follow a predetermined order which could not be accounted for in terms of the frequency with which learners heard the language items. Moreover, children from very different L1 backgrounds acquired a number of morphemes in virtually the same order. However, the order differed from that of the L1 learners investigated by Brown. A replication of the studies with adult learners produced strikingly similar results to those with children.

                   As a result of these and other investigations, it was concluded that in neither child nor adult L2 performance could the majority of errors be attributed to the learners L1s and that learners in fact made many errors in areas of grammar that are comparable in both the L1 and L2, errors which the CA hypothesis predicted would not occur, Dulay and Burt therefore rejected the hypothesis, proposing instead a hypothesis entitled L2 acquisition equals L1 acquisition and indicating that the two hypotheses predict the appearance of different types of errors in L2 learners speech.

                  Briefly the CA hypothesis states that while the child is learning an L2. He or she will tend to use his native language structures in his L2 speech, and where structures in his L1 and his L2 differ he will goof. For example, in Spanish children learning English should tend to say wants Miss Jones for He wants Miss Jones.

               The ‘L2’ acquisition equals L1 acquisition hypothesis holds that children actively organize the L2 speech that they hear and make generalizations about its structure as children learning their L1 do. Therefore the goofs expected in any particular L2 production would be similar to those made by children learning the same language as their L1. For example Jose want Miss Jones would be expected since L1 acquisition studies have shown that children generally omit functors, in this case the –s inflection for third person singular present indicative.

               In the 1980s Stephen Krashen was the best known figure in the SLA field. He formulated a controversial hypothesis to explain the disparity between the order in which grammatical items were taught and the order in which they were acquired, arguing that there are two mental processes operating in SLA: conscious learning and subconscious acquisition conscious learning focuses on grammatical and to identify instances is a very different process, facilitating the acquisition of rules at a subconscious level. According to Krashen, when using the language to communicate meaning the learner must draw on subconscious knowledge. The suggestion of conscious and subconscious processes functioning in language development was not new or radical: however, Krashen’s assertion that these processes were totally separate, i.e that learning could not become acquisition was Krashen went on to argue that the basic mechanism underlying language acquisition was comprehension. According to his comprehensible input hypothesis, when the student understands a message in the language containing a structure his or her current level of competence advances by one step, and that structure is acquired. These hypotheses had a marked influence on practice as outlined below.

Process Oriented Research:-

              Research reviewed above focused on the products or outcomes of acquisition. A growing body of research considers learning processes, exploring the kinds of classroom tasks that appear to facilitate SLA. The bulk of this research focuses on activities or procedures which learners perform in relation to the input data. Given the content of research in the field, this review is necessarily selective.

              In the first of a series of investigations into learner-learner interaction . Long (1981) found that two way tasks stimulated significantly more modified interactions than one way tasks. Similarly, Doughty and Pica found that required information exchange tasks generated significantly more modified interaction than tasks where exchange of information was optional.

             The term ‘modified interaction’ refers to instances during an interaction when the speaker alters the form in which his or her language is encoded to make it more comprehensible. Such modification may be prompted by lack of comprehension on the listeners part. This research into modified interaction was strongly influenced by Krashen’s hypothesis that comprehensible input was a necessary and sufficient condition for SLA, i.e that acquisition would occur when learners understood messages in the target language.

Current and future trends and directions:-

               Current SLA research orientations can be captured by a single word: complexity. Researchers have begun to realize that there are social and interpersonal as well as psychological dimensions to acquisition, that input and output are both important, that form and meaning are ultimately inseparable and that acquisition is an organic rather than linear process.

           In a recent study, Martyn investigated the influence of certain task characteristics on the negotiation of meaning is small group work, looking at the following variable:

1.     Interaction relationship: whether one person holds all of the information required to complete the task whether each participant holds a portion of the information, or whether the information is shared.

2.     Interaction requirement: whether or not the information must be shared.

3.     Goal orientation: whether the task goal is convergent or divergent.

4.     Outcome options: whether there is only a single correct outcome, or whether more than one.

The results seem to indicate that while task variables appear to have an effect on the amount of negotiation for meaning, there appears to be an interaction between task variables, personality factors and interactional dynamic. This ongoing research underlines the complexity of the learning environment and the difficulty of isolating psychological and linguistic factors from social and interpersonal ones.

   A major challenge for curriculum designers, materials writers and classroom practitioners who subscribe to task based teaching is how to develop programmes that integrate tasks with form focused instruction. This is particularly challenging when teaching beginners in foreign language contexts. A number of applied linguists are currently exploring the extent to which one can implement task based teaching with beginner learners, and experiments are under way to establish the appropriate balance and ‘mix’ between tasks which have non-linguistic outcomes and exercises which have linguistic outcomes.

    In searching for metaphors to reflect the complexity of the acquisition process some researchers have argued that the adoption of an ‘organic’ perspective can greatly enrich our understanding of language acquisition and use. Without such a perspective, our understanding of other dimensions of language will be piecemeal and incomplete as will any attempt at understanding and interpreting utterances in isolation from the contexts in which they occur. The organic metaphor sees SLA more like growing a garden than building a wall. From such a perspective, learners do not learn one thing perfectly one item at a time, but learn numerous things simultaneously. The linguistic flowers do not all appear at the same time, nor do they all grow at the same rate. Some even appear to wilt for a time before renewing their growth. Rate and speed of development are determined by a complex interplay of factors related to pedagogical interventions; speech processing constraints: acquisitional processes and the influence of the discoursal environment in which the items occur.

                         In this topic David Nunan describe the emergence of SLA as a discipline from early work in CA, error analysis and interlanguage development. He examine research into SLA in both naturalistic and instructional settings, considering both process and product oriented studies. This topic also looks at the practical implications of current research for syllabus design and methodology, focusing in particular on the implications of SLA research for syllabus design, the input hypothesis and task based language teaching. The final part of the topic suggest that future work will attempt to capture the complexity of the acquisition process by incorporating a wide range of linguistic, social, interpersonal and research process.  



Reference:-
          

The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to Speaker Of Other Languages/chapter 12/Second Language acquisition/David Nunan

   

Globalisation and the future of Postcolonial Studies

Topic :- Globalisation and the future of Postcolonial Studies

Name :- Chauhan Sejal Arunbhai

Subject :- The Postcolonial Literature.

Paper :- 11

Roll No :-

M.A. PART-II SEM-III

Year- 2013-15

Submitted to :- Dr.Dilip.Barad

Smt.S.B.Gardi

Department of English

M.K.Bhavnagar University.

Globalisation and the future of Postcolonial Studies

                As we know that since the events of 11 September 2001, the so-called global war on terror and the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, it is harder than ever to see our world as simply “postcolonial”. As the new American Empire develops openly and shrilly advocated by policy- makers, politicians and academics within the Us and elsewhere, it is more urgent than ever to think about the questions of domination and resistance that have been raised by anti-colonial movements and postcolonial studies worldwide. At the same time, these violent events are also part of the phenomenon we think of as blobalisation, which has provided fresh grounds for examining the relevance of postcolonial perspectives to the world which we now inhabit. Globalisation seems to have transformed the world so radically, many of its advocates and critics suggest that it has rendered obsolete a critical and analytical perspective which takes the history and legacy of European colonialism as its focal point. It is meaningless to continue to define our world in relation to the dynamics of European colonialism or decolonization. Globalisation, they argue cannot be analyzed using concepts like margins and centres so central to postcolonial studies.

                Today’s economics, politics, cultures and identities are all better described in terms of transnational networks, regional and international flows and the dissolution of geographic and cultural borders, paradigms which are familiar to postcolonial critics but which are now invoked to suggest a radical break with the narratives of colonization and anti-colonialism.

                  Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire argues that the contemporary global order has produced a new form of sovereignty which should be called ‘Empire’ but which is best understood in contrast to European empires:

In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities , flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. The distinct national colors of the imperial map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow.

Empire argues that whereas the old imperial world was marked by competition between different European powers, the new order is characterized by a

“single power that over determines them all, structures them in a unitary way, and treats them under one common notion of right that is decidedly postcolonialist and postimperialist.”

Hardt and Negri do not identity the United States as this new power, although they do argue that ‘Empire is born through the global expansion of the internal US constitutional project’, a project which sought to include and incorporate minorities into the mainstream rather simply expel or exclude them. Likewise, contemporary Empire is ‘imperial and not imperialist’ because it does not consist of powerful nations that aim to’ invade, destroy and subsume subject countries within its sovereignty’ as the old powers did but rather to absorb them into a new international network.

                       Hardt and Negri suggest that the new Empire is better compared to the Roman Empire rather than to European colonialism, since imperial Rome also loosely incorporated its subject states rather than controlling them directly.

                        Susie O’Brien and Imre Szeman believe that ‘characterizing US political and cultural power as a global dominants from a more thorough examination of sites and modalities of power in the global era’; accordingly they celebrate Empire as ‘ Exceptionally helpful in advancing our capacity to think past the reinscription of globalization as a centre/ periphery dynamic that produces resistant margins and hegemonic cores’.

                       In their view it is this model of margin and which has prevented postcolonial studies from being able to analyse the operations of contemporary power.

                      Other critics warn that geopolitical centres and margins have not simply evaporated and that globalization has intensified pre-existing global asymmetries, particularly those that were produced by modern colonialism. Tim Brennan observes that Empire ‘has almost nothing to say about the actual people and histories the empires left behind the authors barely nod in the direction of quest worker systems, uncapitalized agriculture, and the archipelago of maquiladoras at the heart of globalization’s gulag … the colonized of today are given little place in the book’s sprawling thesis about multitudes, biopolitical control, and the creation of alternative values’.

                     The controversy about Empire is thus shaped by wider and ongoing debates about the nature and effects of globalization. Hardt and Negri’s Post Foucaultian emphasis and indeed their suggestion that global networks have not only changed the nature of repression but will in fact facilitate resistance by the global ‘multitude’ from diverse locations all over the world, resonates in disturbing ways with the claims of globalisation’s neo-liberal advocates who argue that the global mobility of capital, Industry, workers, goods and consumers dissolves earlier hierarchies and inequities, democratizes nations and the relations between nations and creates new opportunities which percolate down in some form or another to every section of society. These claims are also echoed by many cultural critics for example, in Appadurai’s Modernity at Large, catalogues of ‘multiple locations’ and new hybridities new forms of communication, new foods, new clothes and evidence for both the newness and the benefits of globalization.

                      Such a connection is precisely what many of the writings on globalization proclaim. Whereas the advocates of globalization see the new economic order as already having engendered better lives for people, Hardt and Negri suggest that the new cultural, economic and political flows offer ‘new possibilities to the forces of liberation’ because global power can then be challenged from multiple sites by its multiple subjects whom they refer to as the ‘multitude’.

                       Culturalist views of differences moreover, are for from being entirely new products of globalization. Balibar himself connects neo-racism to the anti-semitism of the Renaissance. More recently Lisa Lampert indicates the congruence between Samuel Huntington’s rhetoric of the ‘clash of civilizations’ and medieval anti-semitism and Islamophobia. Early modern views of Muslims and Jews are also important in reminding us that ‘culture’ and ‘biology’ have in fact never been neatly separable categories and that strategies of inclusion and exclusion have always worked hand in hand. Thus, it was the mass conversion of Jews and Moors after they were officially expelled from Catholic Spain in 1492 that intensified anxieties about Christian identity. It was then that the Inquisition formulated the ‘pure blood’ laws which engendered pseudo-biological ideologies of differences (see Friedman 1987; Loomba 2002). On the other hand, in the heyday of imperialism too, as I have already discussed at some length, racial ideologies did not work through the ideology of exclusion alone but always strategically appropriated and included many of its others.

                   Critics of globalization do not deny the fact or the transformatory powers of the phenomenon, or the many ways in which it indeed marks a departure from the old world order. But they contest its supposedly democratizing effects or radical potential, and point out that by treating contemporary globalization as if it did not have a history, its inequities tend to get obscured. There is no doubt that globalization has made information and technology more widely available and has brought economic prosperity to certain new sections of the world. However, the mobility of capital, P.Sainath observes, for from fostering ideological openness, has resulted in its own fundamentalism, which then catalyses others in reaction:

Market fundamentalism destroys more human lives than any other simply because it cuts across all national, cultural, geographic, religious and other boundaries. It’s as much at home in Moscow as in Mumbai or Minnesota. A South Africa whose advances in the early 1990s thrilled the world moved swiftly from apartheid to neo-liberalism. It sits as easily in Hindu, Islamic or Christian societies. And it contributes angry, despairing recruits to the armies of all religious fundamentalisms. Based on the premise that the market is the solution to all the problems of the human race, it is too, a very religious fundamentalism. It has its own Gospel: The Gospel of St.Growth, of St choice…..

                       Not everyone has forgotten that legacy of that first global asymmetry upon which ours is built. Here is a report from The New York Times (Friday October 17, 2003) speaking of huge demonstrations in La Paz which defied military barricades to protest a plan to export natural gas to the United States:

‘ Globalization is just another name for submission and domination’, Nicanor Apaza,46, an unemployed miner, said at a demonstration this week in which Indian Women…..carried banners denouncing the International Monetary Fund and demanding the president’s resignation, ‘we’ve had to live with that here for 500 years, and now we want to be our own masters.’

                           He and many other protesters see an unbroken line from this region’s often rapacious colonial history to the failed economic experiments of the late 20^th century, in which Bolivia was one of the first Latin American Countries to open itself to the modern global economy. The $5 billion gas pipeline project is only the latest gambit.

Starting with the end of a military dictatorship two years ago, Bolivia embraced the free market model. State-owned companies were sold off Foreign investment was courted Government regulation was reduced Exports have actually declined compared with their level 25 years ago. Growth has stalled for the pats few years Unemployment has soared, and Bolivia remains the poorest country in South America, with a per capita income….less than it was before the free market reforms.

                                       ……In the colonial era, silver from the mines of Potosi provided Spain with the wealth that allowed it to forge a global empire, and in modern times, tin made a few families…….fabulously wealthy.

                             It is not only the vulnerable and those at the receiving end who make the connections between past empires and the global economy. Joseph E Stiglitz ,Noble laureate and once Chief Economist at the World Bank, also uses the phrase ‘market fundamentalism ‘ in his critique of globalization as it has been imposed upon the world by institutions like the World Bank and the IMF:

The international financial institutions have pushed a particular ideology market fundamentalism that is both bad economics and bad politics: it is based on premises concerning how markets work that do not hold even for developed countries, much less for developing countries. The IMF has pushed these economics policies without a broader vision of society or the role of economics within society. And it has pushed these politics in ways that have undermined emerging democracies. More generally, globalization itself has been governed in ways that are undemocratic and have been disadvantageous to developing countries, especially the poor within those countries.  

Stiglitz connect these developments to colonialism, suggesting that ‘ the IMF’s approaches to developing countries has the feel of a colonial ruler.’ And that developing countries dealing with the IMF have been forced to ask ‘ a very disturbing question: Had things really changed since the “official” ending of colonialism a half century ago?’

                             Advocates of the new American empire simultaneously appropriate the legacy of earlier empires and claim a radical exceptionalism for a US empire. This strategy is exemplified by an essay in The Atlantic Montly by Robert D. Kaplan tellingly entitled ‘supremacy by Stealth; in which he sees no contradiction between global networks of the kind identified by Hardt and Negri and an American hegemony:

The historian Erich S. Green has observed that Rome’s expansion throughout the Meditrranean littoral may well have been motivated not by an appetite for conquest per se but because it was thought necessary for the security of the core homeland. The same is true for the United States worldwide, in an age of collapsed distances. This American imperium is without colonies, designed for a jet and information age in which mars movements of people and capital dilute the traditional meaning of sovereignty.  

                            Kalplan offers ten rules for the US Empire, all of which require him to go back to the British Empire, but also to America’s own past. Rule No.1, called ‘Manliness’, invokes the male bonding that supposedly existed between British colonizers and the more refined of their subjects. Rule No.5, ‘Be Light and Lethal’, asks imperialists to openly appropriate and rewrite history: ‘although many journalists and intellectuals have regarded as something to be ashamed of, the for more significant, operational truth is that it exemplifies how we should act worldwide in the foreseeable future’.

                           This rewriting has, as we all know, begun to happen. The destructive histories of modern empires are being widely whitewashed. Thus David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism asks us to believe that there was no racism in the British Empire. Thus too George W Bush now claims that the United States freed Filipinos instead of colonizing them. Such whitewashing not only obscures, distorts and ignores anti-colonial and post=colonial scholarship but also directly attacks it. Dinesh D’Souza’s ‘Two Cheers for Colonialism’ claims that ‘apologists for terrorism’ such as ‘justification of violence’ rely on a large body of scholarship ‘which goes by the names of “anti-colonial studies”, “postcolonial studies”, or subaltern studies”,. Niall Ferguson claims to be disturbed be the fact that the British Empire has had a pretty lousy press from a generation of ‘postcolonial’ historians anachronistically affronted by its racism. But the reality is that the British were significantly more successful at establishing market economies, the rule of law and the transition to representative government than the majority of postcolonial governments have been. The policy ‘mix’ favored by Victorian imperialists reads like something just published by the International Monetary Fund, if not the world Bank: Free trade, balanced budgets, sound money, the common law, incorrupt administration and investment in infrastructure financed by international loans. These are precisely the things the world needs right now.

                           During the heyday of the British Empire, the medieval concept of translation imperii,which suggested that political power or legitimacy ‘translated’ first from Greece to Rome, and then to Western Europe, was freely invoked as justification of European imperialism. Today it surfaces again in order to anoint the US as Britain’s rightful heir:

Winston Churchill saw in the United States a worthy successor to the British Empire, one that would carry on Britain’s liberalizing mission. We cannot rest until something emerged that is just as estimable and concrete or what Churchill saw when he gazed across the Atlantic. (Kaplan)

And as Paul Johnson fervently puts it :

Fate, or Divine Providence, has placed America at this time in the position of sale superpower, with the consequent duty to uphold global order and to punish, or prevent, the great crimes of the world…..It must continue to engage the task imposed upon it, not in any spirit of hubris but in the full and certain knowledge that it is serving the best and widest interest of humanity.

                          This is precisely the rhetoric used by the Bush administration in its invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. Hardt and Negri’s suggestion that the United states acts as an imperial power ‘not as a function of its own motives but in the name of global right’ thus confuses the discursive self-promotion of US leaders with the actual dynamics of US military power today. As the world-wide protests against the war have made clear, neither people at large nor even most nation-states have given the US the right to act on their behalf and they certainly regard the US as simultaneously ultra-nationalist and imperialist.

                        It is clear, then, that US nationalism and national interests remain at least as important as the interests of particular multinational corporations in shaping these and other conflicts around the globe.

                       Thus, at the end we can say that it is not surprising that postcolonial studies should be attacked in such a situation; I have already mentioned some critiques, and they are escalating and taking new form every day. Stanley Kurtz, a fellow at Stanford University Hoover Institution, has urged the US House of Representatives to ensure that federal funding to ‘area studies’ centres in US universities is linked to their training studies for careers in national security, defence and intelligence agencies, and the Foreign service. Such centres have, he says, become ‘anti-American’ under the influence of postcolonial scholarship and especially Edward Said’s Orientalism:

‘Said equated professors who support American foreign policy with the 19^th century European intellectuals who propped up racist colonial empires. The core premise of post-colonial theory is that it is immoral for a scholar to put his knowledge of foreign language and cultures at the service of American power (Kurtz).

                       In fact, one of Edward Said’s most valuable achievements in Orientalism was not simply to establish the connection between scholarship and sate power in the colonial period, but to indicate its afterlife in a ‘post colonial’ global formation with the US at its epicenter. If universities are to remain sites of dissent and free intellectual inquiry, if scholarship is not to be at the service of American or any other power, critiques of past and ongoing empires are going to be more necessary than ever. 



Reference:-

 

Colonialism/Postcolonialism/Ania Loomba/The New Critical Idiom pourledge/2005  

     

    

    

   

The Scarlet Letter and the Language of History: Past Imperfect, Present Imperfect, Future Perfect?

Topic :- The Scarlet Letter and the Language of History: Past Imperfect, Present Imperfect, Future Perfect?

Name :- Chauhan Sejal Arunbhai

Subject :- The American Literature.

Paper :- 10

Roll No :-

M.A. PART-II SEM-III

Year- 2013-15

Submitted to :- Dr.Dilip.Barad

Smt.S.B.Gardi

Department of English

M.K.Bhavnagar University.

The Scarlet Letter and the Language of History: Past Imperfect, Present Imperfect, Future Perfect?

                 As we know that the first appearance of the scarlet letter is particularly striking in that everything about the artefact is remarkably obscure except for its ambiguous historicity:

“ time, and wear, and a sacrilegious moth, had reduced it to little other than a rag.”

Initially it is not even recognizable merely “ a certain affair of fine red cloth”, an  object stripped of its glamour, its ‘glitter’.

                          Its history is doubly one of loss for not only is it “defaced” but, even in its decayed state, it “ gives evidence of a now forgotten art.” Its very from has to be recovered: only careful examination allows it to assume “ the shape of a letter”. However although its shape may have been established, form does not confer meaning, but only the strong possibility that the letter has significance:

“ there was some deep meaning in it, most worthy of interpretation”.

For that interpretation to be possible, story is needed Mr.Surveyor Pue’s narrative which reveals the meaning of the letter. Hawthorne makes it clear that his central symbol belongs to, is the product of history and therefore can only be understood in terms provided by narrative, by a historiography. And as “ The Custom House ” further indicates, history is not only a crucial subject of the fiction as a whole, but the very existence of The Scarlett Letter is the product of history as Hawthorne’s personal history intersects with a wider public history.

                           Here Hawthorne argues that the experience which is dependent on habit destroys the historical imagination on which a true recognition of reality must be based. The elderly members of the Custom House are condemned for their inability to have made anything useful or valuable from their pasts.

                            Here the General’s identity can be recreated as Hawthorne shows when he looks at him “affectionately”. And he suggest that the true reality for the General himself lies within his own consciousness as he recreates and inhabits his past. As the scarlet letter initiates Hawthorne’s desire to retell Hester’s story and come to terms with Old New England, so it is one item from the General’s past that makes it possible for Hawthorne to understand him:

“ There was one thing that much aided me in renewing and recreating the stalwart soldier of the Niagara frontier, the man of true and simple energy. It was the recollection of those memorable words of his, “I’ll try sir!”……… breathing the soul and spirit of New England hardihood comprehending all perils, and encountering all.

                              It is the historical imagination that makes it possible for Hawthorne to comprehend what the General was which is at least as important as what he is.

                            One purpose of “ The Custom House” is then to demonstrate that the past can be reconstructed through the sympathetic and informed imagination, an imagination whose other name should be the historical sense. Hawthorne stresses that he has a double past and with that emphasis he prepares us for his concern with the different but ideally united realms of the public and private sides of human identity which is so crucial in the main story. One of Hawthorne’s pasts is his immediate personal past when he defined himself as a writer.

                              He emphasizes that the “discovery” of the letter re-awoke his literary feelings and made him realize that neither his own past as writer nor the public, historical past was dead. That fictive fragment from history is presented as having a wider function than re-awakening his old artistic impulses for it also brings into focus a concern with a wider history, with Hawthorne’s evolution of the past of Salem and his seriocomic account of his relationship ith his ancestors.

                             The fact that discovery of the only too clearly symbolic A is so obviously at the centre of “ The Custom House ” might seem to contradict this. But as I have tried to suggest, while the reader is told that the letter is an artefact containing considerable power, as long as its meaning remains unknown, which is to say as long as its historical context is unknown, as long as it lacks a placing narrative, it can only communicate itself to Hawthorne’s ‘ sensibilities” while “ evading the analysis of ” his “mind”. However “ worthy of interpretation ” the sign in isolation may be it cannot be decoded until the accompanying text is read, when it can take its meaning from its place in a story. Until then, what it ” signified “ is an insoluble “ riddle ” because of the way in which meanings can be lost from history, “ So evanescent are the fashions of the world.”

                         If the main narrative argues that history will vanquish symbolism’s attempt to freeze time and meaning “ The Custom House ” suggest that the Present is in any case both a fragile and a problematic concept. There Hawthorne makes a confession of failure yet the very fact of making the confession invites us to consider whether the question of social reality in the present is not always dependent on history.

                          His fiction of contemporary life, The House of the Seven Gables, is overtly built on history, connecting as the preface tells us “ a by gone time with the very present that is flitting away from us “ and it is that historical narrative which enables Hawthorne to offer a picture of the modern world.  One crucial problem in producing or, rather reproducing the realistic text that Hawthorne might have written instead of The Scarlet Letter is the way in which contemporary reality is always vanishing not so much into history as into limbo because Hawthorne lacks the proper perspective to deal with the experience even though contemporary reality appears to him as an already written text:

A better book than I shall ever write was there; leaf after leaf presenting itself to me. Just as it was written out by the reality of the flitting hour, and vanishing as fast as written, only because my brain-wanted the insight and my hand the cunning to transcribe it.

                                  One point about “ The Custom House “ is that he had shown ways that such a work might be constructed with its necessary roots in private and public history. Another related point is that the difference between Hawthorne’s historical romance and a realistic fiction of contemporary life is one of degree, not kind. The rupture with the Custom House means that the immediate past is in danger of being lost to history even if it is history as autobiography were it not far “ The Custom House”.

The life of Custom House lies like a dream behind me. The old Inspector….. and all those other venerable personages who sat with him….. with only imaginary inhabitants to people its wooden houses…..Henceforth, it ceases to be a reality of my life.

                                Dream, shadows, images, fancy, haze of memory, mist cloud- land, imaginary: these are the words that Hawthorne uses  to describe his sense of his very recent past.

                                 Here Hawthorne’s emphasis that meaning must be socially negotiated to be valid, that morality is above all social morality, means that, however palliated, Hester’s and Dimmesdale’s adultery must be seen as wrong. Adultery destroys the possibility of the fulfillment of private relationships and of wider public relationships. For Hawthorne it is only when the two are brought together that there is the possibility of sustained authentic life. It is to take the diseased Dimmesdale seven years to learn the lesson that public confession is necessary to heal the split not only between the way he sees himself and the way he is seen but also to heal the relationship between father and daughter, and indeed to enable pearl to escape from the solitary confinement of symbolic definition imposed by her mother.

                                 It is crucially important to realize the value that Hawthorne places in living in right relationship in society, in living a life of open and spontaneous reciprocity, because it is only by remembering this that we can adequately recognize the way symbolism is presented and judge in the fiction. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that Hawthorne is writing a fiction critical of symbolic definition rather than a symbolist work. Thus, Pearl is forced to exercise the function of a symbol not by the reader but by Hester as she replicates what the authorities had done to her, Pearl’s whole appearance was the scarlet letter in another form; the scarlet letter endowed with life! The mother herself as if the red ignominy were so deeply scorched into her brain, that all her conceptions assumed its form had carefully wrought out the similitude; lavishing many hours of morbid ingenuity, to create an analogy between the object of her affection, and the emblem of her guilt and torture. But in truth, Pearl was the one, as well as the other; and only in consequence of that identity had Hester contrived so perfectly to represent the scarlet letter in her appearance.

                              Dimmesdale return from the forest full of an amoral energy produced by his dislocation from his previous history and by the feeling that he can now have hopes for the future. When he returns to his house, this vitality needs to be channeled, and as Male puts it,

“nourished by a communication with the tomb-fed faith wisdom of the past”.

Here he had studied and written: here, gone through fast and vigil, and come forth half alive; here, striven to pray: here, borne a hundred thousand agonies! These was the Bible, in its rich old Hebrew, with Moses and the prophets speaking to him, and God’s voice through all!

Here the private and the public selves can begin to be reintegrated.

                               For such a short fiction, The Scarlet Letter covers a remarkable length of time and a period which has a considerable historical resonance: seven years 1642-49. Whatever the reason for choosing the period of England’s Civil War for the main action of the novel, a substantial length of time in necessary for Hester to build a new identity after her old European self had been destroyed by her sin and its punishment on the scaffold:

“ It was as if a new birth, with stronger assimilations than the first, had converted the forest- land….. into Hester Prynne’s…….life long home”.

And not only Hester’s construction of a new self but also the related matter  of the mutual relationships between herself and the community have to be given time to develop so that a long revolution in the community’s interpretation of the letter and Hester can take place. That relationship is not only long but complex and not without its ironies one irony is that her subversion by decoration of the letter not only enables Hester to find a place in the community’s economy but also that art of needlework that labour of the outsider, in large part reinforces the power structure of the society even though her own thoughts radically question that structure:

Public ceremonies….such a ordinations, the installation of magistrates, and all that could give majesty to the forms in which a new government manifested itself to the people, ….even while sumptuary laws forbade these and similar extravagances to the plebeian order.

There is much that could be said about this passage but one obvious point is that Hawthorne is drawing attention to the class structure of the infant democracy. In so far as her identity is constituted by the letter signifying one meaning along with her labour for the establishment, the patriarchy could hardly ask for a more useful “citizen” than Hester at once a strong warning against hiding the father who has broken the rules and a figure who enables the patriarchy symbolically to declare their command over “painfully wrought” labour – a labour which in its products signifies their power, their difference from “ the plebeian order ”. But the simplicity of symbolic labeling cannot, over time, survive the necessary multiplicity of Hester’s relationship with the society as a whole.

                            As Hawthorne forcibly suggests, authority’s definition has to be seen as a distortion:

“ Owing to the peculiar effect of this convex mirror , the scarlet letter was represented in exaggerated and gigantic proportions, so as to be greatly the most prominent feature of [ Hester’s ] appearance”.

                              I have already argued that one consequence of Dimmesdale’s public acknowledgement of his connection with Pearl and Hester is that Pearl can escape from her limiting status as symbol and become fully human, a woman in the world. It is this that explains her movement to Europe. Pearl is not a Jamesian heroine who has somehow strayed into the wrong book, as is occasionally suggested. She can go to Europe because she has no historical ties with New England. Her only identity there has been as symbol, used by others but without independent existence when that is destroyed, she is free.

                                Hester must return, because it is New England and her sin that has given some sort of organizing principle to her life. After her first appearance on the scaffold,

“ Her sin her ignominy, were the roots which she had struck into the soil…The chain that bound her here was of iron links…. But never could be broken.”

During Dimmesdale’s sermon, Hester stand at the foot of the scaffold

“ Whence she dated the first hour of her life of ignominy….There was a sense within her….that her whole orb of life, both before and after, was connected with this spot, as with the one point that gave it unity”.

To be true, as Hawthorne admonishes us, is freely to declare ourselves to the world, to recognize that we cannot reject or deny the personal history that defines us. We must choose reality over symbol, as Hester chooses to return to New England to live the ethical life:

“But there was a more real life for Hester Prynne, here, in New England, than in that unknown region where Pearl had found a home. Here had been her sin; here her sorrow and here was yet to be her penitence”.

That last sentence is a more economic version with authorial approval of a feeling that Hester had experienced at the beginning of her life of isolation: Here, she said to herself, had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and so, perchance the torture of her daily shame would at length purge her soul, and work out another purity than that which she had lost, more saint like because the result of martyrdom.

                            Hawthorne, by giving Dimmesdale and Hester the role of prophet, brings the future into the sphere of the novel. So that readers are not trapped into conservatively dwelling in and on the past. With both characters, the reciprocal relationships between the public and the private spheres are stressed and developed throughout the course of the novel. The symbolic sign is, at the last, stripped of its various imposed meanings, and becomes simply the letter A, a dead letter. The true significance of the novel can be seen to lie in its creation of structure based on the personal histories of the central characters interacting with the historical life of the new community of New England. Both in turn interact with the double history of the artist and with on imagined better future.

                          Thus, at the end, we can say that The Scarlet Letter is an historical novel one which takes past, present and future into consideration and is at the same time political in that the future is presented as something that we have to struggle to make a making based on desire corrected by our perspectives on the past. 

 



Reference:-

Charles Swann / The Scarlet Letter and the language of History: Past Imperfect, Present Imperfect, Future Perfect?

                    

                         

                       

              

Is Waiting For Godot an Existentialist play?

Topic :- IS WAITING FOR GODOT AN EXISTENTIALIST PLAY?

Name :- Chauhan Sejal Arunbhai

Subject :- The Modernist Literature.

Paper :- 9

Roll No :-26

M.A. PART-II SEM-III

Year- 2013-15

Submitted to :- Dr.Dilip.Barad

Smt.S.B.Gardi

Department of English

M.K.Bhavnagar University.

IS WAITING FOR GODOT AN EXISTENTILIST PLAY?

        As we know that the play, Waiting for Godot is centred around two men , Estragon and Vladimir who are waiting for Mr.Godot of whom they know little. Estragon admits  himself that he may never recognize Mr.Godot,

“ Personally I wouldn’t know him if I ever saw him.”

Estragon also remarks, “…….we hardly know him.” Which illustrates to an audience that the identity of Mr.Godot is irrelevant, as little information is ever given through the play about this indefinable Mr.X. What is an important element of the play is the act of waiting for someone or something that never arrives Western readers may find it natural to speculate on the identity of Godot because of their inordinate need to find answers to questions Beckett however suggests that the identity of Godot is in itself a rhetorical question. It is possible to stress the for in the waiting for the sea the purpose of action in two men with a mission, not to be deflected from their compulsive task.

“ Estragon: …..Let’s go.

Vladimir: We can’t.

Estragon: Why not?

Vladimir: We’re waiting for Godot.”

             The essence of existentialism concentrates on the concept of the individual’s freedom of choice, as opposed to the belief that humans are controlled by a pre-existing omnipotent being, such as God. Estragon and Vladimir have made the choice of waiting without instruction as Vladimir says,

“ He didn’t say for sure he’d come but decides to

“  wait till we know exactly how we stand.”

               Albert Camus, an existentialist writer, believed that boredom or waiting, which is essentially the breakdown of routine or habit, caused people to think seriously about their identity, as Estragon and Vladimir do. In The Plague, Camus suggests that boredom or inactivity causes the individual to think with clarity. Camus and other existential writers, suggested that attempting to answer these rhetorical questions could drive someone to the point of insanity. The tramps continually attempt to prove that they exist, in order to keep their sanity:

“ We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression that we exist?”

                  Waiting in the play induces boredom as a theme. Ironically Beckett attempt to create a similar nuance of boredom within the audience by the mundane repetition of dialogue and actions Vladimir and Estragon constantly ponder and ask questions , many of which are rhetorical or are left unanswered. During the course of the play certain unanswered questions arise:

Who is Godot?

Where are Gogo and Didi?

Who beats Gogo?

All of these unanswered questions represent the rhetorical questions that individuals ask but never get answer for within their lifetime .

Vis a vis is there a God?

Where do we come from?

Who is responsible for our suffering?

The German existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger expressed clearly that human beings can never hope to understand why they are here. The tramps repetitive inspection of their empty hats perhaps symbolizes mankind’s vain search for answers within the vacuum of a universe.

                  Jean Paul Sartre, the leading figure of French existentialism declared that human beings require a rational basis for their lives but are unable to achieve one and thus human life is a futile passion. Estragon and Vladimir attempt to put order into their lives by Waiting for a Godot who never arrives. They continually subside into the futility of their situation reiterating the phrase” Nothing to be done.” Vladimir also resolves with the notion that life is futile or nothing is to be done at the beginning replaying.

“ All my life I’ve tried to put it from me… And I resumed the struggle.”

              Estragon’s questions is left unanswered by Vladimir. Note that these questions seem to bring pain or anxiety to Estragon. Beckett conveys a universal message that pondering the impossible questions that arise from waiting cause pain, anxiety, inactivity and destroy people from within. Note that both Vladimir and Estragon ponder suicide, by hanging themselves from the tree, but are unable to act through to anxiety, as Estragon states,

“ Don’t let’s do anything. It’s safer.”

“ Estragon: Well, shall we go?

Vladimir: Yes, let’s go.

They do not move.”

                Beckett infers that humans ‘pass time’ by habit or routine to cope with the existentialist dilemma of the dread or anxiety of their existence Beckett believes that humans basically alleviate the pain of living or existence substantiates Sartre’s view that humans require a rational base for their lives. Beckett feels that habit protects us from whatever can neither be predicted or controlled, as he wrote about the theme of habit in his published essay concerning Proust:

“ Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightening-conductor of his existence. Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing is habit. Life is habit.”

Estragon and Vladimir constantly ‘pass the time’ throughout the entire play to escape the pain of waiting and to possibly to stop themselves from thinking or contemplating too deeply. Vladimir expresses this idea at the end of the play,

‘ Habit is a great deadener’, suggesting that habit is like an analgesic numbing the individual.  The play is mostly ritual  with Estragon and Vladimir filling the emptiness and silence. “ It’ll pass the time,” explain Vladimir, offering to tell the story of the crucifixion passing the time is their mutual obsession, as exhibited after the first departure of Pozzo and Lucky:

“ Vladimir: That passed the time.

Estragon: It would have passed in any case.

Vladimir: Yes, but not so rapidly.”

Estragon also joins in the game “ That’s the idea, let’s make a little conversation.” The rituals by which Estragon and Vladimir combat silence and emptiness are elaborate, original an d display Beckett’s skill as a writer. In the play Beckett echoes pattern of question, answer and repetition which is his alternative to all the flaccid chat and triviality of the conventionally ‘well structured play’. Gogo and Didi frequently repeat phrases, such as, “ Nothing to be done”. Their actions consist of ritually inspecting their hats. Nothingness is what the two tramps are essentially fighting against and reason why they talk. Beckett suggests that activity and inactivity oppose one another thought arising from inactivity and activity terminating thought. In the second Act they admit that habit suppresses their thoughts and keeps their minimal sanity:

“ Estragon:……..we are incapable of keeping silent.

Vladimir: You’re right we’re inexhaustible.

Estragon: It’s so we won’t think.”

                  As we know that Estragon and Vladimir symbolize the human condition as a period of waiting. Most of society spend their lives searching for goals, such as exam or jobs, in the hope of attaining a higher level or advancing. Beckett suggest that no one advances through the inexorable passage of time Vladimir states this,

“ One is what one is ………….The essential doesn’t change.”

This may be a mockery of an human endeavour, as it implies that mankind achieves nothing and is ironically contradictory to Beckett’s own endeavour . The tragicomedy of the play illustrates this, as two men are waiting for a man of whom they no little about. The anticlimaxes within the play represent the disappointment of life’s expectations. For example POZZO AND LUCKY’s first arrival is mistaken for the arrival of Godot. These points reinforce Kierkagaard’s theory that all life will finish as it began in nothingness and reduce achievement to nothing.

                   A process of dying seems to take place within all four characters, mentally and physically. Estragon and Vladimir may be pictured as having a great future behind them Estragon may have been a poet, but he is now content to quote and adapt, saying,

“ Hope deferred maketh the something sick.”

The something being the heart from a quote from the Bible . Vladimir may have been a thinker, but finds he is uncertain of his reasoning, as when questioned by Estragon about their whereabouts the day before replies angrily,

“ Nothing is certain when you’re about.”

Time also erodes Estragon’s memory, as shown here:

“ Vladimir : what was it you wanted to know?

Estragon: I’ve forgotten. That’s what annoys me.”

Time causes their energies and appetites to ebb. The fantasized prospect of an erection a by product of hanging makes Estragon ‘ highly excited ’. The dread of nightmares plague Estragon during the day ailments and fears become more agonizing. It is an example of Beckett using ‘ordinary’ images to depict mankind’s decay. Time destroys Pozzo’s sight and strips the previous master of almost everything. Beckett’s bitterness towards  time is illustrated by Pozzo’s bleak speech:

“ (suddenly furious) Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time!... One day I went blind….one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you?. (calmer) They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.”

When the structure of action is closing in through the course the play, with the past barely recognizable and the future unknown , the here and now of action, the present acting on stages becomes all important. Existentialist theories propose that the choices of the present are important and that time causes perceptional confusion. Note how shadowy the past becomes to Estragon, as he asks questions such as, “what did we do yesterday?” Moreover, all the characters caught in the deteriorating cycle of events do not aspire to the future.

Estragon portrays the horror of their uneventful repetitive existence:

“ Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!”

The fact that Estragon and Vladimir never seem to reach an event or end is the reason for them wanting to control the end themselves, as Estragon says, “ Like to finish it?” The ‘leaf motif’ is an existentialist theory inferring that life repeats itself with a slight change. Estragon highlights the ‘leaf motif’ theory, saying that a similar person with smaller feet will fill his boots:

“ Another will come, just as …as….as me, but with smaller feet.”

The endless eternal return theory is vividly portrayed at the beginning of the second act:

“ Then all the dogs come running

And dug the dog a tomb

He stops, broods, resumes:

Then all the dogs come running

And dug the dog a tomb.”

                       The play is deliberately unnatural and abstract because it is intended to have universal meaning. The world of Estragon and Vladimir is fragmented of time and place and is submerged with vague recollections of culture and the past. For example Estragon remembers the Bible with uncertainty:

“ I remember the maps with of the Holy Land. Coloured they were.”

                        Estragon and Vladimir talk to each other and share ideas, but it is clear that both characters are self-absorbed and incapable of truly comprehending each other. Estragon and Vladimir regularly interrupt one another with their own thoughts showing their individual self-absorption. Estragon admits,

“ I can’t have been listening.”

And Vladimir says,

“ I don’t understand.”

      Displaying the failures of language as a means of communication .

                           Beckett portrays the human condition as a period of suffering. Heidegger theorized that humans are thrown into the world and that suffering is part of existence.

                            Estragon injects bathos into the serious debates about the thief who was saved by Christ by declaring with bluntness a reductive statement. “ People are bloody ignorant apes.” Estragon and Vladimir often behave comically, finding interest in the banal reducing human experience to the mundane. The tramps comic, banal behavior is very similar to the behavior of another pair of comic characters Laurel and Hardy:

“ Vladimir: Pull on your trousers.

Estragon: What?

Vladimir: Pull on your trousers.

Estragon: You want me to pull off my trousers?

Vladimir: Pull ON your trousers.

Estragon: (realizing his trousers are down) True. (He pulls up his trousers).”

                   At the end we summarize Waiting For Godot as a display of Beckett’s bleak view of life would be a simplistic presumption, as Estragon and Vladimir epitomize all of mankind, showing the full range of human emotions. Estragon and Vladimir do suffer but equally show glimpses of happiness and excitement. They are excited by Pozzo’s arrival and Estragon is “ highly excited” about the prospect of an erection. Equally, as acts of random violence and anger are committed signs of affection are displayed between the characters. Gogo and Didi are the affectionate names Estragon and Vladimir call each other. Didi apologizes for his behavior and displays affection:

“ Forgive me…….Come, Didi…..Give me your hand ……. Embrace me!”

Even brief signs of happiness are portrayed, as Gogo finds Lucky amusing, “ He’s a Scream……..”.

                              Although Gogo and Didi fear being ‘tied’ or dependent on each other. This can be seen as either positive or negative. The pessimistic view is that they cannot escape waiting for Godot, from each other or from their situation in general. The optimistic view of the play shows a range of human emotion and the need to share experiences alongside the suffering of finite existence governed by the past, acting in the present and uncertain of the future.