Novel classification

 Prof Abdelhamid Fouda 

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To classify as a novel, a piece of prose has to be at least 100 pages in length. Those books having shorter lengths are called novellas. The content can draw on real life incidents, but a novel never claims to have real characters and the facts mentioned in a novel cannot be verified in real life.

There are many characters in a novel and the story also has many twists with events and incidents taking place in the lives of the main characters that are linked with each other. There are sub stories and sub plots running in parallel to the main story which is the beauty of a novel. There are many genres in which novels are written, and the word count for all genres is different for a book to be called a novel. However, in general, the minimum word count for a book to be labeled as a novel is 40000.

Fiction

That form of literature that is made up or is a flight of imagination of the writer is labeled fiction. In contrast, books containing facts or real life incidents are called non-fiction. There are many different forms of fiction such as flash fiction, short stories, novellas, and finally novels. However, the common thread running through all these different categories of fiction is the fact that the content or the story is made up by the author and the story or the characters cannot be verified in real life.

What is the difference between Novel and Fiction?

• Fiction is imaginary writing by an author in the form of prose and could belong to many different genres such as romance, mystery, horror etc.

• Novel is a type of fiction as it is a lengthy story containing many characters and plots and subplots

• Novel is the lengthiest of all fiction types and a novel contains at least 40000+ words.

PHONETICS

 Prof Abdelhamid Fouda 

PHONETICS

#The_Study_of_Speech_Sounds

Phonetics has been defined as the science of speech sounds. It is a branch of linguistics and deals with the sounds produced by human beings in their speech behaviour. In speaking trial listening a complex of activities is involved : there is the production of speech which is the result of simultaneous activities of several body organs.

These activities are aimed at creating disturbances in the air. The inhaled air acts as source of energy setting the outside air vibrating so that the sound thus generated is carried along to the ears of the listener. The auditory process is set in motion which is again a complicated process involving auditory organs; perception of speech segments which involves discarding the non-significant features from the significant or distinctive features and perceiving only those that are meaningful. ‘Even a single speech sound combines a large number of distinctive features which provide the information on which an auditor bases recognition of the sound’ (Tiffany-Carrell). It is like retrieving a small visual image from a crowd of intricate details. But the brain can quickly decode the incoming signals that have been encoded by the speakers. ‘Physical energy in the form of sensory nerve impulses reaches the brain’, the brain circuitry is understood to organise them into percepts which are the basis of recognition. Obviously, a complex of multiple factors in the form of the listeners’ interest, his social background, intellectual level, pas! experience and other parameters play an active and significant role in the perception level, and the interpretation is made accordingly.

We thus observe that speech act encompasses intricate movements and activities that occur on different planes, some of them simultaneously and at incredible speed. We ate so used to speaking in a natural effortless manner, that we hardly give attention to the complex nature of speech production and speech perception.

Phonetics has three major branches:

1) Articulatory Phonetics

2) Auditory Phonetics

3) Acoustic Phonetics

Articulatory phonetics is also known as physiological phonetics; and auditory phonetics is known by the name perceptual phonetics.

#Articulatory_Phonetics

This branch of phonetics recognises that there is speech producing mechanism in human beings. ‘The ‘apparatus’ that produces speech sounds is situated within the human body. However, it must be clear that there is no separate ‘apparatus’ exclusively used for generating speech sounds. Speech is, infact, an overlaid function in that human beings utilize in a special way organs which are part of the respiratory and digestive system. Man uses those organs for speaking which already serve other biological needs. Thus lips, teeth, tongue, hard palate, soft palate, trachea, lungs - all these organs used in speech production have different basic biological functions. In the process of cultural evolution, man devised ways of utilizing these organs and parts thereof (such as the tip, blade, front, centre, back of the tongue alongwith the corresponding areas or points in the roof of mouth or hard palate) for verbal communication.

Besides( these the airstream that goes in and out of the lungs forms the basis of speech; that is, speech is based en the outgoing airstream. Articulatory phonetics studies how the outgoing airstream is regulated along the vocal tract to form various speech sounds.

#Auditory_Phonetics

This branch of phonetics studies how speech sounds are heard and perceived. This galls for a close study of the psychology of perception on the one hand, and the mechanism of the neuro-muscular circuitry on the other.

Hearing is a very intricate process; it implies ‘interpreting the physical description of actual or proposed signals in terms of the auditory sensations which the signals would create if impressed upon the ear’ (French). Acoustic signals generate a ‘complex chain of physical disturbances within the auditory system’. The brain receives signal about these physical disturbances; in the brain are caused other disturbances - physical counterparts of the sensations. It is necessary to establish correlation between the auditory signals and their interpretation in terms of the disturbances in the brain. It is a challenging task, one can say that not much headway has been made in unravelling the complex pattern of the course charted by the speech signals through the auditory system into the neuro-muscular processes. However, we can divide the whole process into three stages:

i) the physical aspect of die auditory system

ii) recognition of the essential characteristics of hearing.

iii) interpreting auditory sensations, their attributes and their relation to the signals.

The physical aspect of die auditory system involves a detailed description of the external, middle and inner ear (also known as Cochlea),

Mulk_Raj_Anand

 Prof Abdelhamid Fouda 

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#Untouchable

#Mulk_Raj_Anand

Untouchable is a novel by Mulk Raj Anand published in 1935. The novel established Anand as one of India's leading English authors. The book was inspired by his aunt's experience when she had a meal with a Muslim woman and was treated as an outcast by her family.  The novel’s protagonist is "Bhaka", who is an untouchable, outcast boy. The novel is historical in the sense that it touches upon the caste system, which gave rise to the practice of “Untouchability” that was much prevalent in the Indian society.

#Characters

#Bakha - son of Lakha

#Lakha - Jemadar of the sweepers,

                  Bakha’s father

#Rakha - Bakha’s younger brother

#Sohini -  Bakha’s younger sister

 #Chota - son of a leather-worker, one of             bakha's best friends                                                          

#Ram_Charan -  washer’s son and Bakha’s     other best friend

#Gulabo -A washer woman, Ram Charan’s mother.

#Havildar_Charat_Singh - One of Bakha’s        heroes, a famous hockey player

#Ali - muslim boy

#Ramanand - moneylender

#Waziro - weaver’s wife 

#Pundit_Kali_Nath - priest

#Lachman - A Hindu water-carrier

#Colonel_Hutchinson - The chief of the     local Salvation Army

#Mary_Hutchinson - Colonel’s irreligious wife

#Hakim_Bhagawan_Das - A local doctor

#Miraben_Slade  - daughter of a British admiral

#Iqbal_Nath_Sarshar - A young poet

#R_N_Bashir -An Indian lawyer

#summery

Set in the fictional Indian town of Bulashah, Untouchable is a day in the life of a young Indian sweeper named Bakha. The son of Lakha, head of all of Bulashah's sweepers, Bakha is intelligent but naïve, humble yet vain. Over the course of Bakha's day various major and minor tragedies occur, causing him to mature and turn his gaze inward. By the end of the novel Mulk Raj Anand, the author, has made a compelling case for the end of untouchability on the grounds that it is an inhumane, unjust system of oppression. He uses Bakha and the people populating the young man's world to craft his argument.

Bakha's day starts with his father yelling at him to get out of bed and clean the latrines. The relationship between the father and son is strained, in part due to Bakha's obsession with the British, in part because of Lakha's laziness. Bakha ignores his father but eventually gets up to answer the demands of a high-caste man that wants to use the bathroom. This man is Charat Singh, a famous hockey player. At first, Singh also yells at Bakha for neglecting his cleaning duties. The man has a changeable personality, however. It isn’t long before he instructs Bakha to come see him later in the day so he can gift the young sweeper with a prized hockey stick. An overjoyed Bakha agrees.

High on his good fortune he quickly finishes his morning shift and hurries home, dying of thirst. Unfortunately, there is no water in the house. His sister Sohini offers to go fill the water bucket. At the well, Sohini must wait behind several other outcasts also queued up. Also waiting for water is Gulabo, mother of one of Bakha's friends and a jealous woman. She hates Sohini and is just barely stopped from striking the young woman. A priest from the town temple named Pundit Kali Nath comes along and helps Sohini get water. He instructs her to come clean the temple later in the day. Sohini agrees and hurries home with the water.

Back at home Lakha fakes an illness and instructs Bakha to clean the town square and the temple courtyard in his stead. Bakha is wise to the wily ways of his father but cannot protest. He takes up his cleaning supplies and goes into town. His sweeping duties usually keep him too busy to go into town, and so he takes advantage of the situation by buying cigarettes and candies.

As Bakha eats his candies, a high-caste man brushes up against him. The touched man did not see Bakha because the sweeper forgot to give the untouchable's call. The man is furious. His yelling attracts a large crowd that joins in on Bakha's public shaming. A travelling Muslim vendor in a horse and buggy comes along and disperses the crowd. Before the touched man leaves he slaps Bakha across the face for his impudence and scurries away. A shocked Bakha cries in the streets before gathering his things and hurrying off to the temple. This time, he does not forget the untouchable's call.

At the temple, a service is in full swing. It intrigues Bakha, who eventually musters up the courage to climb up the stairs to the temple door and peer inside. He's only standing there for a few moments before a loud commotion comes from behind him. It's Sohini and Pundit Kali Nath, who is accusing Sohini of polluting him. As a crowd gathers around, Bakha pulls his sister away. Crying, she tells him that the priest sexually assaulted her. A furious Bakha tries to go back to confront the priest, but an embarrassed and ashamed Sohini forces him to leave. Bakha sends his sister home, saying he will take over her duties in town for the rest of the day.

Distraught over the day's events, Bakha wanders listlessly before going to a set of homes to beg for his family's daily bread. No one is home, so he curls up in front of a house and falls asleep. A sadhu also begging for food comes and wakes him. The owner of the house Bakha slept in front of comes out with food for the sadhu. Seeing Bakha, she screams at him and at first refuses to give him food. She finally agrees to give him some bread in exchange for him sweeping the area in front of her house. As Bakha sweeps, the woman tells her young son to relieve himself in the gutter where Bakha is cleaning so he can sweep that up too. A disgusted Bakha throws down the broom and leaves for his house in the outcasts' colony.

Back at home, it's only Lakha and Sohini. Rakha, Bakha's younger brother, is still out collecting food. Bakha tells his father that a high-caste man slapped him in the streets. Sensing his son's anger, Lakha tells him a story about the kindness of a high-caste doctor that once saved Bakha's life. Bakha is deeply moved by the story but remains upset. Soon after story time, Rakha comes back with food. A ravenous Bakha starts to eat but then is disgusted by the idea of eating the leavings of the high-caste people. He jumps up and says he's going to the wedding of his friend Ram Charan's sister.

At Ram Charan's house, Bakha sees his other friend, Chota. The two boys wait for Ram Charan to see them through the thicket of wedding revellers. Ram Charan eventually sees his friends and runs off with them despite his mother's protestations. Alone, Chota and Ram Charan sense something is wrong with their friend. They coax Bakha to tell them what's wrong. Bakha breaks down and tells them about the slap and Sohini's assault. Ram Charan is quiet and embarrassed by Bakha's tale, but Chota is indignant. He asks Bakha if he wants to get revenge. Bakha does but realizes revenge would be a dangerous and futile endeavour. A melancholic atmosphere falls over the group. Chota attempts to cheer Bakha up by reminding him of the hockey game they will play later in the day. This reminds Bakha that he must go and get his gift from Charat Singh.

Bakha goes to Charat Singh's house in the barracks, but cannot tell if the man is home. Reluctant to disturb him or the other inhabitants, Bakha settles under a tree to wait. Before long, Singh comes outside. He invites Bakha to drink tea with him and allows the untouchable to handle his personal items. Singh's disregard for Bakha's supposed polluting presence thrills Bakha's heart. Thus he is overjoyed when Singh gives him a brand-new hockey stick.

Ecstatic about this upswing to his terrible day, Bakha goes into the hockey game on fire. He scores the first goal. The goalie of the opposite team is angry over Bakha's success and hits him. This starts an all-out brawl between the two teams that ends when a player's younger brother gets hurt. Bakha picks up the young boy and rushes him home, only to have the boy's mother accuse him of killing her son. Good mood completely destroyed, Bakha trudges home, where his father screams at him for being gone all afternoon. He banishes Bakha from home, saying his son must never return.

Bakha runs away and takes shelter under a tree far from home. The chief of the local Salvation Army, a British man named Colonel Hutchinson, comes up to him. He sees Bakha's distress and convinces the sweeper to follow him to the church. Flattered by the white man's attention, Bakha agrees, but the Colonel's constant hymn singing quickly bores him. Before the two can enter the church the Colonel's wife comes to find him. Disgusted at the sight of her husband with another “Blackie,” she begins to scream and shout. Bakha feels her anger acutely and runs off again.

This time Bakha runs towards town and ends up at the train station. He overhears some people discussing the appearance of Mahatma Gandhi in Bulashah. He joins the tide of people rushing to hear the Mahatma speak. Just as Bakha settles in to listen, Gandhi arrives and begins his speech. He talks about the plight of the untouchable and how it is his life's mission to see them emancipated. He ends his speech by beseeching those present to spread his message of ending untouchability. After the Mahatma departs a pair of educated Indian men have a lively discussion about the content of the speech. One man, a lawyer named Bashir, soundly critiques most of Gandhi's opinions and ideas. The other, a poet named Sarshar, defends the Mahatma passionately and convincingly. Much of what they say goes above Bakha's head, so elevated are their vocabulary and ideas. However, he does understand when Sarshar mentions the imminent arrival of the flushing toilet in India, a machine that eradicates the need for humans to handle refuse. This machine could mean the end of untouchability. With this piece of hope Bakha hurries home to share news of the Mahatma's speech with his father.

LITERARY CRITICISM

 Prof Abdelhamid Fouda 

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LITERARY CRITICISM - Important critics with their important works ( Each one will be discussed separately) 

  A) Greek critics

     1. Socrates 

     2. Plato - Republic 

     3. Aristotle - Poetics 

  B) Roman critics 

     1.Horace - Ars Poetica 

     2.Longinus- On the sublime 

    3).Quintilian - Institutio Oratoria 

   C) Middle Age critics 

    1. Philip Sidney - An Apology for Poetry 1595

    2. John Dryden - *Astraca Redux 

* Essay on Dramatic Poesy 

   3. Alexander Pope -  An Essay on criticism

   4. Samuel Johnson -  Preface to shakespeare 

   5. Burton - The Anatomy of Melancholy 

   6. Ben Jonson - Discoveries or Timber 

Conversations with Drummund 

  

   D) Romantic Critics 

   1. William Wordsworth - Preface to Lyrical Ballad 

   2. S.T.Coleridge -  Biographia literaria 

   3. John keats 

   4. P.B.Shelley - A defence of poetry 

   5. Thomas love Peacock - Stimulus for the defence of Poetry by shelley 

  6. William Hazlitt - Characters of Shakespeare's plays 

    E) Victorian critics 

   1. Matthew Arnold - *Culture and Anarchy 

* The study of poetry-1888

* On translating Homer - 1861 

  2. G.M.Hopkins - inscape and instress

 

    F) Modern critics 

      1. T.S.Eliot - * The second wood 

 * What is a Classic 

 * Selected Essays

 *. Tradition and individual talent

Common_latin_words_and_their_meanings

 Prof Abdelhamid Fouda 

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#Common_latin_words_and_their_meanings

👉Ad hic means 'to this'

👉Alibi means 'elsewhere'

👉Status quo means 'excisitng state of affairs'

👉De facto means 'in fact'

👉e. g means 'for example'

👉Bona fide means 'with good faith'

👉Carpe diem means 'seize the day'

👉Ergo means 'therefore'

👉Et cetera means 'and so on'

👉i.e means 'that is'

👉Ipromptu means 'spontaneous'

👉Per se means 'in itself'

👉Versus means 'against'

👉Verbatim means 'in exactly the same words'

👉Multi means 'many'

Poststructuralism

 Prof Abdelhamid Fouda 

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Poststructuralism

■■■■■■■■■■■■■

Poststructuralists

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♣♣Jacques Lacan (1901-81) France (Ecrits1966)

♣♣Roland Barthes (1915-80) France (Mythologies 1957)(S/Z 1970)

♣Louis Althusser (1918-90)(Essay-Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus)

♣Jean-François Lyotard (1924-98)

(The Postmodern condition)

♣♣Michael Foucault (1926-84)

France

♣♣Jacques Derrida (1930- )Algeria (Of Gramatology 1967, Writing and difference1978)

♣♣Julia Kristeva (1941- ) Bulgaria (Revolution in Poetic Language 1974)

♣Slavoj Žižek (1949- ) Slovenia

Paul de Man

Geoffrey Hartman

Poststructuralist Views

●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●

Poststructuralism is the general attempt to contest and subvert Structuralism and to formulate new theories regarding interpretation and meaning, initiated particularly by Deconstractors but also associated with certain aspects and practitioners of psychoanalytic, Marxist, cultural, feminist, and gender criticism. 

Poststructuralists have suggested that structuralism rests on a number of distinctions--between signifier and signified, self and language (or text), texts and other texts, and text and the world--that are overly simplistic, if not patently inaccurate, and they have made a concerted effort to discredit the oppositions. 

1. Language-

 Poststructuralists have viewed the self as the Subject, as well as the user, of language, claiming that although we may speak through and shape language, it also shapes and speak through us.

2. Signification-

 Poststructuralists have demonstrated that, in the grand scheme of signification, all 'signifieds' are also signifiers, for each word exits in complex linguistic matrix and has such a variety of denotations and connotations that no one meaning can be said to be final, stable, and invulnerable to reconsideration and substitution. Signification is unstable and indeterminate, and thus is so meaning. 

3. Text and intertexuality- Poststructuralists, who have generally followed their structuralist predecessors in rejecting the traditional concept of the literary "work" (as the work of an individual and purposeful author) in favour of the impersonal "text" , have gone structuralists one better by treating texts as "intertexts" : crisscrossed strands within the infinitely larger text called language, that networked system of denotation, connotation, and signification in which the individual text is inscribed and read and through which its myriad possible meanings are ascribed and assigned. (Poststructuralist Julia Kristeva coined the term intertextuality to refer to the fact that a text is a "mosaic" of preexisting texts whose meanings it reworks and transforms.)

4. Deconstruction (world as text)- Poststructuralists have even viewed the world itself as a text. The poststructuralist view of the world as  text has been set forth most powerfully and controversially by the deconstructive theorist Derrida in his book Of Gramatology (1967) , where he maintains that "there is nothing outside the text" . We know the world through language, and the acts and practices that constitutes the "real world" are inseperable from the discourses out of which they arise and as open to interpretation as any work of literature, Derrida is not alone in deconstructing the world/text opposition. Pal de Man viewed language as something that has great power in individual, social, and political life. Hartman went so far as to claim that "nothing can lift us out of language. "

Derrida rejected the structuralist presupposition that texts (or other structures) have self-referential centres that govern their language (or signifying system) without being in any way determined, governed, co-opted, or problematized by that language (or signifying system). Having rejected the structuralist concept of a self-referential Centre, Derrida also rejected its corollary:that a text's meaning is thereby rendered determinable (capable of being determined) as well as determinate (fixed and reliably correct).

5. Psychoanalysis (Lacan)

Lacan posited that the human unconscious is structured like a language. He treated dreams not as Freud treated them--as revelatory of symptoms of repression--but rather as a form of discourse. Lacan also argued that the "ego" , subject, or self that we think of as being necessary and natural (our individual human nature) is in fact a product of social order and its various and often conflicting symbolic system (especially, but not exclusively, language). The "ego-artifact, " produced during what Lacan called the "mirror stage" of human development, seems at once unified, consistent, and organized around a determinate centre. But the unified self, or ego, is a fiction, according to Lacan. The yoking together of fragments and destructively dissimilar elements takes its psychic toll, and it is the job of the Lacanian psychoanalyst to "deconstruct", as it were, the ego, to show its continuities to be contradictions as well. 

6. Psychoanalysis (Kristeva)

Kristeva, another psychoanalytic critic, explores the relationship between a number of binary oppositions, like normal/poetic, conscious/unconscious, and most importantly, semiotic/symbolic,  within Western culture. Kristeva associates the semiotic with the chaotic, the irrational, the fluid, and argues that the semiotic has the capacity to undermine the symbolic, which is associated with the coherent and the logical. 

Kristeva, by the way, hints at a possible association of the semiotic with the feminine and the symbolic with the masculine, an idea that laid the groundwork for the feminist concept of ecriture féminine : woman's writing. 

7. Study of cultures (Foucault)

Foucault refused to see power in terms of simple, binary oppositions (as something exercised by a dominant class over a subservient class). He argued that power is not simply repressive power, that is, a tool of conspiracy by one individual or institution against another. Rather, power is a complex of interwoven and often contradictory forces ; power produces what happens. Thus, tyrannical aristocrat does not simply wield power, for he is empowered by discourses (accepted ways of thinking, writing, and speaking) and practices that embody, exercise, and amount to power. 

8. Barthes

Barthes said that the author as an institution (that is, the author traditionally conceived as the source of knowledge, the controller of a text's meaning, and a chief object of critical interest) is dead. Along with Foucault and de Man,  Barthes views the author not as an original and creative master and manipulator of the linguistic system but , rather, as one of its primary vehicles, an agent through which it works out new permutations and combinations. These theorists even criticize humanism insofar as it views the human "subject" as a consistent, creative, and purposive entity. 

Other important poststructuralist ideas elaborated by Barthes include the French concepts of plaisir  (pleasure) and jouissance (which roughly translates as playful, ecstatic enjoyment) and the terms lisible and scriptable . Barthes argued that texts were either lisible ("readerly") or scriptible ("writerly"). Lisible indicates a certain dependence on convention, which facilitates interpretation. Scriptible implies a significant degree of experimentation, a flouting or modification of traditional rules that makes a text difficult to interpret and, occasionally, virtually incomprehensible. 

9. Conclusion

Even as the Poststructuralists have radically reduced the author's role, they have also diminished the role of the reader, whom they view not as a stable, coherent, and consistent subject or self but rather as a locus of competing and often contradictory discourses. 

Poststructuralists have radically revised the traditional concept of Theory even as they have elevated it to a position of prime importance. In their view, Theory has more than literature to account for, since everything from the unconscious to social and cultural practices is seen as functioning like a language;  thus the goal of poststructuralist theorists is to understand what controls interpretation and meaning in all possible systems of signification. 

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Distinctions between Structuralism and Poststructuralism

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(Separate article)

What Post-structuralist  critics do

●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●

(Separate article)

Deconstruction

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(Separate article)