MA IV Sem The American Scholar

The American Scholar

The American Scholar was a speech given by Ralph Waldo Emerson on August 31, 1837, to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was invited to speak in recognition of his groundbreaking work Nature, published a year earlier, in which he established a new way for America's fledgling society to regard the world. Sixty years after declaring independence, American culture was still heavily influenced by Europe, and Emerson, for possibly the first time in the country's history, provided a visionary philosophical framework for escaping "from under its iron lids" and building a new, distinctly American cultural identity.

The address was published in 1837, and again in 1838. It was published in London in 1844 as Man Thinking: An Oration. The oration is a more concrete version of Emerson’s philosophic system. It is the “Declaration of Independence” in American Letters.

The address was a practical appeal to the American Scholar to raise himself above the dust of peasantries and to reach after the inspiration of the divine soul which inspires all men. The message can be summed up in two words – “trust thyself”, do not quit your belief stand indomitably on your instincts, the world is nothing – man is all.

2. It was Emerson’s best effort to present his whole view point in a single work. There is consistency of tone and consecutiveness of argument in it which is due to the organic metaphor that is used the concept of one men on which the whole essay depends. Emerson believed in the organic principle of the universe as a living organism. He believed in the social body of humanity ion of all things in a unity as the ultimate organisation of all things in a unity. The scholar most work for this unity which is forever changing. Emphasis is placed on the principle of change and progression. The scholar cannot be content with assimilating other man’s ideas he must create his own. He must bring forth that living contemporary truth, not the dead thoughts of the past.

3. The whole address falls into three divisions: the introduction of the subject and its importance, the education of the scholar and the forces that influence him, and the duties and functions of the scholar as Emerson sees it.

4. He starts with the concept that the individual is the unit of measurement in the universe. In the individual is the law of all the nature. The social body of humanity is properly “one man”. But in the divided state various functions of the “one man” are distributed to individuals who do their own work and are cut off from the rest. Thus each is a “part” man and not a ‘whole’ man. Man has thus wronged himself- he has become mass and herd, and the individual is of no account. This wrong is to be righted by the scholar to whom intellect has been delegated in the individual distribution. Rightly understood it means that the scholar is “Man Thinking”. And the scholar must realise that thinking is a continual process, he must continue thinking and promulgating (make known to the people) or disseminate the new living thought and not to be the parrot of scholar man’s thinking.

5. What are the main influences on a scholar during his education: a) nature, b) the mind of the past, c) the world, and d) the scholar’s participation in the experience of life. He may know himself. There is affinity between them. Man seeks to systematize and unify and so he explores the laws governing facts. He is scientist who observes and classifies and speculates on the relations between things. Thus he has the perception of relation is an imaginative and intuitive act, nature and his soul appears as the manifestations of the same universal soul. If he learns one he will know the other. To follow the command “know thyself” man studies nature.

a) Nature: Man is constantly in the presence of nature. What is nature?

There is never a beginning; there is never an end to the continuity of this web of God but always circular power returning to itself. Man and nature have correspondence, man studies nature so that he may know himself. Nature and his soul appear as the manifestation of the same universal soul. If he learns one he will know the other. To follow the command “know thyself” man must study nature.

b) The mind of the past- in the form of literature or art or any institutions that has mind inscribed on it- also teaches him. Through them he comes to know the minds of the greatest man of ages. But books should inspire man to find what is highest within himself. The whole value of history, of biography is to increase man’s self trust, by demonstrating what man can be and do. Thus the great books inspire man but they must not confine him. They should help in revealing his creative activity. Reading must be followed by periods of solitude in quest and self recovery for genius can be his enemy by over influence. They should help him as nature does to know himself. By knowing himself he knows other man. The deeper he penetrates into his secret the more he will understand other people. By his intuitive feelings he will find they are the most acceptable, most public and universally true. Better part of every man feels “this is myself”.

C) Participation in life and experience of life are also essential to the scholar. Activity and action may be subordinates, but they are essential to the scholar. Without this experience he is not a full man, because thought can never ripen into truth. The scholar must receive the world into him, brood on it, give it a new arrangement and utter it. One knows only so much of himself as he knows about life. Experience of life is the raw material for intellect and the instructor in eloquence and wisdom. The final value of life is that like books, it is a resource where the scholar can always go to renew himself. Live life and feel life.

6. H e then discusses the duties and functions of the scholar. He says that they are such as are suitable to Man Thinking. This may be comprised in the one virtue of self trust. And it is through this self trust that the scholar is to cheer, to raise and to guide men. He is to do this by seeing reality himself and showing it to them. This can only be done by observation painful slow observation without hope of immediate fame. He will encounter scorn and hostility but he must bear all this and travel alone for the ultimate compensation that he will be the world’s heart, the world’s eye.  

7. For this he requires confidence in himself and never to defer to the popular cry. He must be free of urgent kind of hindrance. He must be brave. Fear springs from ignorance. He must face things squarely y perceive them clearly, and publish them for what they really are. He must restore the value of the individual which is the real basis of unity, for it is one soul which animates all men.

8. He ends by telling the American scholar to give up the tradition of Europe and replace it with their own liking for native tradition. These views can be applied to any nation and to any literature and therein lies the importance and the universality of the essay.

Summary

Emerson uses Transcendentalist and Romantic views to get his points across by explaining a true American scholar's relationship to nature. There are a few key points he makes that flesh out this vision:

·         We are all fragments, "as the hand is divided into fingers", of a greater creature, which is mankind itself, "a doctrine ever new and sublime."

·         An individual may live in either of two states. In one, the busy, "divided" or "degenerate" state, he does not "possess himself" but identifies with his occupation or a monotonous action; in the other, "right" state, he is elevated to "Man", at one with all mankind.

·         To achieve this higher state of mind, the modern American scholar must reject old ideas and think for him or herself, to become "Man Thinking" rather than "a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking", "the victim of society", "the sluggard intellect of this continent".

·         "The American Scholar" has an obligation, as "Man Thinking", within this "One Man" concept, to see the world clearly, not severely influenced by traditional/historical views, and to broaden his understanding of the world from fresh eyes, to "defer never to the popular cry."

·         The scholar's education consists of three influences:

·         I. Nature as the most important influence on the mind

·         II. The Past manifest in books

·         III. Action and its relation to experience

·         The last, unnumbered part of the text is devoted to Emerson's view on the "Duties" of the American Scholar who has become the "Man Thinking."

[edit]Importance

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. declared this speech to be America's "Intellectual Declaration of Independence."^[1] Building on the growing attention he was receiving from the essay Nature, this speech solidified Emerson's popularity and weight in America, a level of reverence he would hold throughout the rest of his life. Phi Beta Kappa's literary quarterly magazine, The American Scholar, was named after the speech, and when printed, sold well.^[2] An exception is the harsh reaction to his speech, The Divinity School Address, eleven months later (see the separate entry).

M A IV Sem The Zoo Story

The Zoo Story

Edward Franklin Albee III (born March 12, 1928) is an American playwright who is known for works such as The Zoo Story (1958), The Sandbox (1959), and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). His works are considered well-crafted, often realistic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflect a mastery and Americanization of the Theatre of the Absurd. He was greatly influenced by the works of European playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet. Albee continues to experiment in works such as The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (2002).

A member of the Dramatists Guild Council, Albee has received three Pulitzer Prizes for drama—for A Delicate Balance (1967), Seascape (1975), and Three Tall Women (1994). His play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was selected for the 1963 Pulitzer Prize by the award's drama jury, but was overruled by the advisory committee, which elected not to give a drama award at all. Albee was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1972. In 1985, Albee was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame. In 1999, Albee received the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award as a Master American Dramatist. He received a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement (2005); the Gold Medal in Drama from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1980); as well as the Kennedy Center Honors and the National Medal of Arts (both in 1996). In 2009 Albee received honorary degree a.k.a. "Doctor Honoris Causa" by the Bulgarian National Academy of Theater and Film Arts (NATFA), a member of the Global Alliance of Theater Schools.

He currently is a distinguished professor at the University of Houston, where he teaches an exclusive playwriting course. His plays are published by Dramatists Play Service and Samuel French, Inc.. In 2008, in celebration of Albee's eightieth birthday, a number of his plays were mounted in distinguished Off Broadway venues, including the historic Cherry Lane Theatre. The playwright directed two of his one-acts, The American Dream and The Sandbox there. These were first produced at the theater in 1961 and 1962, respectively.

The Zoo Story, originally titled Peter and Jerry, is a one-act play by American playwright Edward Albee. His first play, it was written in 1958 and completed in just three weeks. The play explores themes of isolation, loneliness, miscommunication as anathematization, social disparity and dehumanization in a commercial world.

Plot : This one-act play concerns two characters, Peter and Jerry, who meet on a park bench in New York City's Central Park. Peter is a middle-class publishing executive with a wife, two daughters, two cats and two parakeets. Jerry is an isolated and disheartened man, desperate to have a meaningful conversation with another human being. He intrudes on Peter’s peaceful state by interrogating him and forcing him to listen to stories about his life, and the reason behind his visit to the zoo. The action is linear, unfolding in front of the audience in “real time”. The elements of ironic humor and unrelenting dramatic suspense are brought to a climax when Jerry brings his victim down to his own savage level.
Eventually, Peter has had enough of his strange companion and tries to leave. Jerry begins pushing Peter off the bench and challenges him to fight for his territory. Unexpectedly, Jerry pulls a knife on Peter, and then drops it as initiative for Peter to grab. When Peter holds the knife defensively, Jerry charges him and impales himself on the knife. Bleeding on the park bench, Jerry finishes his zoo story by bringing it into the immediate present: "Could I have planned all this. No... no, I couldn't have. But I think I did." Horrified, Peter runs away from Jerry, whose dying words, "Oh...my...God", are a combination of scornful mimicry and supplication.

Summary

One Sunday afternoon, Peter, an upper-middle-class family man and publishing executive in his mid-forties, is reading a book on a bench. Jerry, a sloppily dressed transient in his late thirties, approaches and announces that he is coming from the Central Park Zoo. Despite Peter’s apparent reluctance to chat, Jerry strikes up a conversation. Jerry’s forward personality quickly begins to annoy Peter – he points out that Peter will likely get cancer from smoking, and implies that Peter is emasculated because he has cats instead of dogs.

Jerry continues to ask Peter questions about his life, his job, and his interests. When Peter finally begins to return Jerry’s questions, Jerry tells him about his miserable apartment in a flophouse on the Upper West Side. He describes his unsavory neighbors and the junk that comprises his possessions – including two empty picture frames. When Peter asks him about the picture frames, Jerry explains that he is completely alone in life. His parents died when he was young, and his only significant romantic relationship was a short liaison he had with another boy when he was a teenager.

Jerry promises to tell Peter about his trip to the zoo, but is sidetracked into telling Peter about his landlady, a drunken woman who constantly propositions him. When she got a dog, Jerry tried to befriend it, but the dog responded only by attacking him. After repeated and repudiated attempts at friendship, Jerry decided to murder the dog by feeding it a poisoned hamburger patty. Although this sickened the dog, it eventually recovered and began to simply leave him alone.
Peter finds this story extremely disturbing, and wonders why Jerry told it to him. Jerry explains that he tries to befriend animals as a gateway to befriending other people.
Peter tries to excuse himself, but Jerry tickles him to keep him from leaving. He then tries to force Peter to move from the bench, and punches him when he refuses. Although Peter initially realizes that Jerry’s behavior is absurd, he gradually becomes more possessive of the bench.
Jerry pulls a knife and insists the men fight for it. This shocks Peter, who refuses to fight. As a gesture of peace, Jerry gives the knife to Peter, who holds the knife out to protect himself. Suddenly, Jerry charges Peter and impales himself on the knife.
Although he is initially hysterical, Jerry soon calms down and accepts his death. He even thanks Peter, using his last energy to wipe Peter’s fingerprints off the knife handle so that Peter will not be accused of his murder. Peter takes his book and dashes off before passers-by notice that Jerry is dying.

Early critics frequently compared The Zoo Story with the work of Samuel Beckett. In fact, when The Zoo Story was first performed in Berlin in 1960, it was part of a double bill with a Beckett one-act play — Krapp’s Last Tape. Indeed, there are a number of important similarities between The Zoo Story and Beckett’s best-known work, Waiting for Godot. Both plays chronicle the relationship between two antagonistic characters who are forced to spend time together, and more importantly, both plays are absurdist in style. Absurdism is closely associated with existential philosophy. In a typical absurdist story, characters must grapple with the meaninglessness of their circumstances — and by extension, of life in general. Absurdist plots are often driven by the emotions the characters experience as they recognize and accept that their lives are meaningless.

Beckett’s work lends itself well to an absurdist interpretation. In Waiting for Godot, the characters are cartoonish and exaggerated, and their predicament is contrived to make a philosophical point. The Zoo Story, on the other hand, is much more realistic in its approach — although it should be noted that realism and absurdism are not mutually exclusive. Realism is a style, and absurdism is a philosophical orientation. Peter and Jerry have quotidian nuanced personalities and quotidian back stories, and the play’s plot, which revolves around an awkward conversation between strangers, is drawn from a common situation of urban life. It could be said, then, that Albee’s work is innovative because it imports an absurdist outlook to the realist dramatic tradition. That it does this with such seeming ease and naturalness is a testament to its greatness.

MA IV Sem The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea

Plot: The Old Man and the Sea is the story of an epic struggle between an old, seasoned fisherman and the greatest catch of his life. It is the tale as a chronicle of man’s battle against the natural world, but the novella is, more accurately, the story of man’s place within nature. For eighty-four days, Santiago, an aged Cuban fisherman, has set out to sea and returned empty-handed. So conspicuously unlucky is he that the parents of his young, devoted apprentice and friend, Manolin, have forced the boy to leave the old man in order to fish in a more prosperous boat. Nevertheless, the boy continues to care for the old man upon his return each night. He helps the old man tote his gear to his ramshackle hut, secures food for him, and discusses the latest developments in American baseball, especially the trials of the old man’s hero, Joe DiMaggio. Santiago is confident that his unproductive streak will soon come to an end, and he resolves to sail out farther than usual the following day.
On the eighty-fifth day of his unlucky streak, Santiago does as promised, sailing his skiff far beyond the island’s shallow coastal waters and venturing into the Gulf Stream. He prepares his lines and drops them. At noon, a big fish, which he knows is a marlin, takes the bait that Santiago has placed one hundred fathoms deep in the waters. The old man expertly hooks the fish, but he cannot pull it in. Instead, the fish begins to pull the boat.
Unable to tie the line fast to the boat for fear the fish would snap a taut line, the old man bears the strain of the line with his shoulders, back, and hands, ready to give slack should the marlin make a run. The fish pulls the boat all through the day, through the night, through another day, and through another night. It swims steadily northwest until at last it tires and swims east with the current. The entire time, Santiago endures constant pain from the fishing line. Whenever the fish lunges, leaps, or makes a dash for freedom, the cord cuts Santiago badly. Although wounded and weary, the old man feels a deep empathy and admiration for the marlin, his brother in suffering, strength, and resolve.
On the third day the fish tires, and Santiago, sleep-deprived, aching, and nearly delirious, manages to pull the marlin in close enough to kill it with a harpoon thrust. Dead beside the skiff, the marlin is the largest Santiago has ever seen. He lashes it to his boat, raises the small mast, and sets sail for home. While Santiago is excited by the price that the marlin will bring at market, he is more concerned that the people who will eat the fish are unworthy of its greatness.
As Santiago sails on with the fish, the marlin’s blood leaves a trail in the water and attracts sharks. The first to attack is a great mako shark, which Santiago manages to slay with the harpoon. In the struggle, the old man loses the harpoon and lengths of valuable rope, which leaves him vulnerable to other shark attacks. The old man fights off the successive vicious predators as best he can, stabbing at them with a crude spear he makes by lashing a knife to an oar, and even clubbing them with the boat’s tiller. Although he kills several sharks, more and more appear, and by the time night falls, Santiago’s continued fight against the scavengers is useless. They devour the marlin’s precious meat, leaving only skeleton, head, and tail. Santiago chastises himself for going “out too far,” and for sacrificing his great and worthy opponent. He arrives home before daybreak, stumbles back to his shack, and sleeps very deeply.
The next morning, a crowd of amazed fishermen gathers around the skeletal carcass of the fish, which is still lashed to the boat. Knowing nothing of the old man’s struggle, tourists at a nearby café observe the remains of the giant marlin and mistake it for a shark. Manolin, who has been worried sick over the old man’s absence, is moved to tears when he finds Santiago safe in his bed. The boy fetches the old man some coffee and the daily papers with the baseball scores, and watches him sleep. When the old man wakes, the two agree to fish as partners once more. The old man returns to sleep and dreams his usual dream of lions at play on the beaches of Africa. The old man feels very unwell and also coughs up blood a few times towards the end of the story
Santiago
From the very first paragraph, Santiago is characterized as someone struggling against defeat. He has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish. Almost as a reminder of Santiago’s struggle, the sail of his skiff resembles “the flag of permanent defeat.” But the old man refuses defeat at every turn: he resolves to sail out beyond the other fishermen to where the biggest fish promise to be. He lands the marlin, tying his record of eighty-seven days after a brutal three-day fight, and he continues to ward off sharks from stealing his prey, even though he knows the battle is useless.
Because Santiago is pitted against the creatures of the sea, the tale becomes as a chronicle of man’s battle against the natural world, but the novella is, more accurately, the story of man’s place within nature. Both Santiago and the marlin display qualities of pride, honor, and bravery, and both are subject to the same eternal law: they must kill or be killed. As Santiago reflects when he watches the weary warbler fly toward shore, where it will inevitably meet the hawk, the world is filled with predators, and no living thing can escape the inevitable struggle that will lead to its death. Santiago lives according to his own observation: “man is not made for defeat . . . [a] man can be destroyed but not defeated.” In Hemingway’s portrait of the world, death is inevitable, but the best men (and animals) will nonetheless refuse to give in to its power. Accordingly, man and fish will struggle to the death, just as hungry sharks will lay waste to an old man’s trophy catch.
The novel suggests that it is possible to transcend this natural law. It is precisely through the effort to battle the inevitable that a man can prove himself. Indeed, a man can prove this determination over and over through the worthiness of the opponents he chooses to face. Santiago finds the marlin worthy of a fight. His admiration for these opponents brings love and respect into an equation with death, as their destruction becomes a point of honor and bravery that confirms Santiago’s heroic qualities. Santiago, though destroyed at the end of the novella, is never defeated. Instead, he emerges as a hero. Santiago’s struggle does not enable him to change man’s place in the world. Rather, it enables him to meet his most dignified destiny.
Many parallels exist between Santiago and the classic heroes of the ancient world. In addition to exhibiting terrific strength, bravery, and moral certainty, those heroes usually possess a tragic flaw—a quality that, though admirable, leads to their eventual downfall. If pride is Santiago’s fatal flaw, he is keenly aware of it. After sharks have destroyed the marlin, the old man apologizes again and again to his worthy opponent. He has ruined them both, he concedes, by sailing beyond the usual boundaries of fishermen. Indeed, his last word on the subject comes when he asks himself the reason for his undoing and decides, “Nothing . . . I went out too far.”
While it is certainly true that Santiago’s eighty-four-day run of bad luck is an affront to his pride as a masterful fisherman, and that his attempt to bear out his skills by sailing far into the gulf waters leads to disaster, Hemingway does not condemn his protagonist for being full of pride. On the contrary, Santiago stands as proof that pride motivates men to greatness. Because the old man acknowledges that he killed the mighty marlin largely out of pride, and because his capture of the marlin leads in turn to his heroic transcendence of defeat, pride becomes the source of Santiago’s greatest strength. Without a ferocious sense of pride, that battle would never have been fought, or more likely, it would have been abandoned before the end.
Santiago’s pride also motivates his desire to transcend the destructive forces of nature. Throughout the novel, no matter how baleful his circumstances become, the old man exhibits an unflagging determination to catch the marlin and bring it to shore. When the first shark arrives, Santiago’s resolve is mentioned twice in the space of just a few paragraphs. First we are told that the old man “was full of resolution but he had little hope.” Then, sentences later, the narrator says, “He hit [the shark] without hope but with resolution.” The old man meets every challenge with the same unwavering determination: he is willing to die in order to bring in the marlin, and he is willing to die in order to battle the feeding sharks. It is this conscious decision to act, to fight, to never give up that enables Santiago to avoid defeat. Although he returns to Havana without the trophy of his long battle, he returns with the knowledge that he has acquitted himself proudly and manfully. Hemingway seems to suggest that victory is not a prerequisite for honor. Instead, glory depends upon one having the pride to see a struggle through to its end, regardless of the outcome. Even if the old man had returned with the marlin intact, his moment of glory, like the marlin’s meat, would have been short-lived. The glory and honor Santiago accrues comes not from his battle itself but from his pride and determination to fight.
In order to suggest the profundity of the old man’s sacrifice and the glory that derives from it, Hemingway purposefully likens Santiago to Christ, who, according to Christian theology, gave his life for the greater glory of humankind. Crucifixion imagery is the most noticeable way in which Hemingway creates the symbolic parallel between Santiago and Christ. When Santiago’s palms are first cut by his fishing line, the reader cannot help but think of Christ suffering his stigmata. Later, when the sharks arrive, Hemingway portrays the old man as a crucified martyr, saying that he makes a noise similar to that of a man having nails driven through his hands. Furthermore, the image of the old man struggling up the hill with his mast across his shoulders recalls Christ’s march toward Calvary. Even the position in which Santiago collapses on his bed, face down with his arms out straight and the palms of his hands up—brings to mind the image of Christ suffering on the cross. Hemingway employs these images in the final pages of the novella in order to link Santiago to Christ, who exemplified transcendence by turning loss into gain, defeat into triumph, and even death into renewed life.
Death is the unavoidable force in the novella, the one fact that no living creature can escape. But death, Hemingway suggests, is never an end in itself: in death there is always the possibility of the most vigorous life. The reader notes that as Santiago slays the marlin, not only is the old man reinvigorated by the battle, but the fish also comes alive “with his death in him.” Life, the possibility of renewal, necessarily follows on the heels of death.
Whereas the marlin’s death hints at a type of physical reanimation, death leads to life in less literal ways at other points in the novella. The book’s crucifixion imagery emphasizes the cyclical connection between life and death, as does Santiago’s battle with the marlin. His success at bringing the marlin in earns him the awed respect of the fishermen who once mocked him, and secures him the companionship of Manolin, the apprentice who will carry on Santiago’s teachings long after the old man has died.
Santiago dreams his pleasant dream of the lions at play on the beaches of Africa three times. The first time is the night before he departs on his three-day fishing expedition, the second occurs when he sleeps on the boat for a few hours in the middle of his struggle with the marlin, and the third takes place at the very end of the book. In fact, the sober promise of the triumph and regeneration with which the novella closes is supported by the final image of the lions. Because Santiago associates the lions with his youth, the dream suggests the circular nature of life. Additionally, because Santiago imagines the lions, fierce predators, playing, his dream suggests a harmony between the opposing forces—life and death, love and hate, destruction and regeneration—of nature.
Magnificent and glorious, the marlin symbolizes the ideal opponent. In a world in which “everything kills everything else in some way,” Santiago feels genuinely lucky to find himself matched against a creature that brings out the best in him: his strength, courage, love, and respect.
The shovel-nosed sharks are little more than moving appetites that thoughtlessly and gracelessly attack the marlin. As opponents of the old man, they stand in bold contrast to the marlin, which is worthy of Santiago’s effort and strength. They symbolize and embody the destructive laws of the universe and attest to the fact that those laws can be transcended only when equals fight to the death. Because they are base predators, Santiago wins no glory from battling them.