Vocation of a Scholar

Vocation of a Scholar

Richard Altick and Frensternmaker write that the literary scholar and the critic are engaged in a comman pursuit, so they both show the differences between Critic and Scholar. 

Some professional students of literature prefer to regard themselves primarily as critics, some as scholars; but the dichotomy between the two is far more apparent than real, and every good student of Literature is constantly combining the two rocks, often without knowing it.

The critics business is primarily with the literary work itself - with its structure, style, and content of ideas, tha means critics studies only text with its structure. Believing that "every work of art must be seen from without as well as from within." Every history minded person knows, the scholar values them in direct porpotion to the help they afford - at once or in a prospect - in illuminating specific pieces of literature and the interaction of many works that constitutes what is called Literary History.

George Whalley said for Critic and Scholar, 

" No true scholar can lack critical acumen; and the scholar's eye is rather live the poet's - not, to be sure, in a fine frenzy rolling, 

but at least looking for something as yet unknown which it knows it will find, with perceptions heightened and modified by the act of looking.

For knowing is qualitative and is profoundly affected by the reason for wanting to know."

Again it is clear that no critic can afford not to be a scholar without scholarship every synoptic view will be cursory. The genuine scholar is impelled by a deeply ingrained curiosity, an undeniable urges to learn as well as to teach. Than the discussion moves towards the dramatic discoveries. Here is a Hamlet, here is a lyric by Shelley, here is a Great Expectations. Each is intelligible in itself, and any attentive reader can derive immense pleasure from it. But almost

"Every Literary work  is attended by a host of outside circumstances that,

once we expose and explore them, suffuse it with additional meaning."

Sainte - Beuve's critical axiom tel arbre, tel fruit ( Like the tree, like the Fruit) it is the product of an individual human being's imagination and intellect, As to be sure, but the fact remains that behind the book is a man or woman whose character and experience can not be overlooked in any effort to established what the book really says. To understand a book, we must also understand the manifold socially derived attitudes - the morality, the myths, the assumptions, the biases, that it reflacts. 

"Literary research, then, is denoted for one thing... to the enlightenment of criticism which may or may not take advantage of the proffered information."

In further discussion is about Personal Satisfaction. Unmeasurable but intensely real personal satisfactions that literary research affords men and women of a certain temperament: the joy of finding out things or finding new way that have previously been unknown and thus of increasing. 

Publish or Perish: This discussion and idea of 'publish and perish' moves to academic writing, for example if you are working in the field of academic writing then you must write such thing which should be Published in the well known book, magazine, or any other sources. But if you would not publish anything then you will be thrown of the academic field. Your identity as an academician will sure Perish. Morris Bishop, the Cornell specialist in French Literature and writer of light verse and detective stories. He said about the literaty research:

".......I am not against research. I practice it, I honor it, I love it. But a taste for literary research is something special. It is not the same thing as delight in reading, or delight in introducing others to the pleasures of reading or the pleasures of writing. We do well to encourage literary research. We do ill."

Then, Dr. Johnson held,

" No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

If so, the history of literary scholarship at its best is populated with amiable block - heads. Scholars may value the creature comfort as highly as do people in any other line of work, but it is their itch to know more, not primarily the prospect of enlarged salary checks, that draws them to the library after their classes are met, their papers graded, their committee
  meetings attended. 'Interpret, understand and appreciate' , the scholar must follow these three words. Then, there is discussion on a successful and happy scholar.

What are the chief qualities of mind and temperament that go to make up a successful and happy scholar?

Law and Journalism: The practice of law requires a through command of the principles of evidence, a knowledge of how to make one's efficient way through the accumulated "literature" on a subject, and a denotion both to accuray and to detail. It was perhaps no accident that James Boswell himself, who often would, "run half over London, in order to fix a date correctly", was a lawyer by profession. Journalism, more specifically the work of the investigative reporter, also calls for resourcefulness - knowing where to go for one's information and how to obtain it, the ability to recognize and follow up leads, and tenacity in pursuit of the facts.

     Both professions, moreover require organizational skill, the ability to put facts together in a pattern that is clear and, if controversy is involved, persuasive.

"Idea research must love literature for its own sake,

that is to say, as an art

They must be insatiable readers, and the earlier

they have acquired that passion, the better."   

Intellectual sympathies that only devotion to an art and a desire to share it with others, can provide. Wordsworth has rightly said in 'Perlude':

"What we have Loved, Others will love,

and..., we will teach them how.." 

That same dedication in fuses one's activity as a professional scholar. As Vendler said:

"As scholars, we..... love, beyond philogy, and compositions and literature, the worth of scholarship, by which we mean accurate evidence on literary matters. 

We are engaged in teaching others - our more advanced students - how to love what we love in the discipline of scholarship: how to prize the exact edition over the inadequate one; how to value concision and clarity over obscurity and evasiveness; how to appreciate a new critical vocabulary when it brings energy or insight into our world" 

 

So, scholar should have all this above mentioned abilities to reasearch in the literary study.

    

    Once there was an illusion, nourished by the plodding me thodicalness of German philology that literary research tolerates to a degree the subjective impression, as is inevitable in a discipline that deals with the human consciousness and the art is produce but as assembles and assayers of historical fact, literary scholar need to be as rigorous in their method as scientist. And indeed, a background in science is almost as good preparation for literary research as is one in law or newspaper work, because some of the same qualities are required; intellectual curiosity, shrewdness, precision, imagination - the lively inventiveness that constantly suggests new hypothesis, new strategies, new sources of information, and when all the data are in, makes possible their accurate interpretation and evaluation.

"Scholarship involves a great amount of detail work,

in which no margin of error is allowed and,

over which the analytic intellect must constantly preside."  

It is no occupation for the imapatient or the careless; not is it one for the easily fatigued. Scholars must not only be capable of hard, often totally fruitless work -  they must actually relish it. The taste of a Vocation, the aphorist - essayist Logan Pearshall Smith once wrote, "is the love of the drudgery it involves." 

H.L.Mencken attributes to the Japanese:

 

"Learning without wisdom is a load of books on an ass's back"

One can be researcher, full of knowledge, without also being a scholar. Research is the means scholarship the end; research is an occupation, scholarship is a habit of mind and a way of life. Scholars are more than researchers, for while they may be gifted in the discovery and assessment of facts, they are, besides persons of broad and luminous learning. They are never either engulfed or overawed by mere data, because their minds are able to see them in the long perspective of mankind's artistic ambitions and achievements.

Conclusion:

for although in this book the words research and scholarship are used inter changeably. as is the common practice, a much that has been said so far implies a distinction between the two that certainly exist, if not in the letter or present usage, at least in the spirit. Scholars do their research in the very analytical way. They have both the wisdom and the knowledge that enable them to put facts in their place in two senses.

  

Leading Twentieth-Century Postcolonial Thinkers

Postcolonialism : Elleke Boehmer

Introduction:

"Post-colonialism speaks about the human consequences of external control and economic exploitation of native people and their lands."

The past couple of decades have seen the publication of a vast number of cultural critiques of empire and its aftermath designated with the label "Postcolonial".

     Postcolonialism a term addresses itself to the historical, political, cultural and textual remifications of the colonial encounter between the west and the non-west, dating from the sixteenth century to the the present day. It considers how this encounter shaped all those who were party to it: the colonizers as well as the colonized. 

Boehmer's work has been seen as foundational to the field of postcolonial studies in her field of postcolonial studies. In her first book, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Boehmer provides a radically historicising survey of global anglophone literaru production from the 1830s, the period of the so called second empire, to the present, and critically examines key arguments, term, and problems in anti-colonial thought and postcolonial theory. Post colonialisms is thus a name for a critical theoretical approach in literary and cultural studies, but it also, as importantly, designates a politics of transformational resistance to unjust and unequal forms of political and cultural authority which extends back across the 20th century, and beyond.

Different traditions of Postcolonial Thinking: 

1) The Theoretical Post-structuralist 2) The Practical Political

are thus linked in so far as some of the key concepts in postcolonialism in its first meaning derive from anti-colonial politics and world wide struggles for rights, as this chapter will in part show.

Leading Twentieth-Century Postcolonial Thinkers

Nationalist developments after 1945, combined with the work of postcolonial nationalist intellectuals, were profoundly important in shaping representations of the postcolonial world: yet it is widely agreed that it was the publication of Edward Said's ground-breaking study. Orientalism(1978), which in institutional terms marked the beginning of postcolonial studies.Critics concerned with anti-colonial political practices and frustrated by the highly textual or discursive content of post- 1968 literary theory. Such critics have included Gayatri Spivak, who applies Derridean concepts of 'difference' to the indian colonial context. and Homi Bhabha, who has reread Lacan in relation to the psychological construction of the native self, as will be seen.

  " Postcolonial Nationalist Represents the Postcolonial World"

Edward Said

" Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate."

Edward Wadie Said was a professor of Literature at Columbia University, a public intellectual, and a founder of the academic field of postcolonial studies.

Born: 1 November 1935, Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine

Died: 25 September 2003, New York City, United   States  

Era:   20th Century philosophy

Notable Ideas: Orientalism, the other..  

     In Orientalism, and in two contemporaneous publications, The Question of Palestine (1979) and Covering Islam (1981), Edward Said demonstrated that Foucault's idea that power operates through systems of knowledge applied to the way in which authority was exercised in the colonial world. 'Orientalism', therefore a systematic discipline or discourse about the Orient/ the East/ the Palestine, functioned as a 'Corporate Institution' for understanding and controlling other peoples.

"Orientalism was a western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient"

Orientalism inspired the production of a host of spin-off and related studies that developed, refined and expanded aspects of Said's thinking. Christopher Miller's Blank Darkness (1985) has also valuable examined the construction of Africa as against  the Eastern 'Orient', how it was set up within colonial discourse as a third, unspoken other in relation to the dualism of Europe and the East.

Culture and Imperialism (1993), in which he again discuss some of the key cultural productions of the West, opera as well as literature, as subtly expressive, both stylistically and symbolically, of imperial dominance. Yet, if the study is concerned to expose empire as the invisible ideological scaffolding of, say, the European novel, it at the same time confronts the crucial question of into feelings of inferiority and unworthiness, Said argues,

"Postcolonial writers are able to take on or appropriate the forms, style, and symbols in short, the cultural vocabulary of the dominant texts and myths of colonial Europe." 

With Culture and Imperialism Said thus, to an extent , parts company with Foucault, for whom resistance is always represented as equal but opposite to the system of power and therefore as locked into it. Therefore, even if Said is more concerned in Culture and Imperialism than previously to deal with native resistance, for him the construction of the resistance, anti-colonial self is to be accomplished first and foremost by adapting specifically Western configurations of identity. For him contrapuntal writing back involves taking up the techniques and weapons of negation of the west. Such as stereotypes of the lazy native or the noble savage, in order first to remake, and then eventually to transcend them. 

"As writers and critics, therefore, they exercise not only aesthetic but also political agency. They use text as tools that have worldly, anti-colonial effects, that change hearts and minds."

Gayatri Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian scholar, literary theorist, and feminist critic. She is University Professor at Columbia University. Where she is founding member of institute for comparative literature and society.

Born: 24 February 1942, Culcutta, British Raj

Era:  Contemprory philosophy  

Notable Ideas: Strategic essentialism,  the subaltern, the other...

Main Interest: Literary criticism, Feminism, marxism, Postcolonialism.

" Nationalism can only ever be a crucial political agenda against oppression. All longing to the contrary, it can not provide the absolute guarantee of identity." 

     Gayatri Spivak, the Indian-born USA- based critics perhaps most crucial intervention has been, very simply, to argue for the heterogeneity of colonial oppression. Gayatri Spivak's name is associated with some theoretically sophisticated if not recondite writing in the postcolonial field. Beginning her theoretical work in that important decade for postcolonial studies, the 1980s, she has been concerned to point to the differences both pronounced and subtle which separate and divide those called natives or the colonized. She emphasizes that how different forms of othering or diiferent kinds of subject formation under colonialism, even within the category of the oppressed, were not necessarily commensurable the one with the other. 

Subaltern term: Which has an ultimate military etymology, is derived from the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who used it to designate non-elite social classes and groupings like the proletariat.

      In her contribution to the understanding of Subaltern state under colonialism was to expand its signification to include groups even more downgraded than these, and those who do not figure on the social scale at all: for example, tribals or unscheduled caste, untouchables and within all these groups, women.

Can The Subaltern Speak? (1988)

In her celebrated essay, Spivak exposes the irony that the social-historical analysis which is most intent on retrieving the voices of such politically and historically 'silenced' groups succeeds, by the very practice of that analysis and the development of privileged knowledge, conclusively to silence them. Spivak's focus is, as suggested, rigorously directed to points of contradiction or cognitive failure in a text, where it lays bare the gaps or 'aporia' within its own ideological assumptions. 

     Indeed, for all that her work is highly theoratically informed, and for all that one of the implications rising from her work is that colonialism is effectively a discursive product. She has always insisted in the importance of making practical, negotiated interventions in situations of unjust domination and inequality- hence her emphasis on what she influentially has called strategic essentialism. 

Homi K Bhabha: 

Homi K. Bhabha is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and language, and the Director of the Humanities center at Harvard University. He is one of the most important figures in contemprory post colonial studies.

Born: 1949, Mumbai, India

Era:    20th century philosophy

Notable ideas: " Third-space", "Enunciatory Present"

"Words will not speak and the silence freezes into the images of the apartheid."  

  

Homi Bhabha's contribution has been differently if relatedly, to theorize ambivalence as operating within the apparently binary or dichotomous colonial system itself. Two main areas of preoccupation which distinguish the work of this Indian -born theorist. 1)The first are is an interest in the productive instabilities  and ruptures of colonial discourse. 2) The second area, which has developed more recently, is a growing concern with the, to Bhabha, still incomplete manifestation of the 'in-between'. for, Bhabha , a major difficulty with Said's work on Orientalism, Bhabha has instead examined the psychic and cultural fault lines which are generated around, and constantly threaten, any simple 'balck and white' distinction between the two conventional parties to the colonial relationship.

    Bhabha productively adapts Derrida's idea concerning the necessary repetition of meaning. Any meaning that is, in order to do its work, 'to mean' , has constantly or repeated.This then is the role of colonizers, ever anxious to reinforce his authority. But no repetition can ever be equivalent to the original meaning. Transferring Derridean 'repetition' into the colonial context, therefore, Bhabha finds that European attempts to replicate their social structures and cultural values in the colony, as part of the civilizing mission, were inevitably refracted and distorted, in particular in the presence of the colonized.

    Bhabha emphasizes at the same cultural vocabularies and values do not always translate across the linguistic, religious and other boundaries dividing communities. This represent a clear change of definition in his thinking from the earlier concern with imperfect repetition. Indeed, what results from intermixing may equally be entirely new cultural languages. These languages do not therefore facilitate a relaxed cross-cultural interaction between different groups. As he gnomi-cally writes:

"the migrant culture of the 'in-between', the minority position, dramatizes the activity of culture's untranslatability ; and in so doing it moves the question of culture's appropriation beyond the assmilationist's dream.....towards an encounter with the ambivalent process of aplitting and difference."

Conclusion:

Against 'the holy trinity' :

The Marxist critic Benita Parry has called the "holy trinity" of Said, Spivak, and Bhabhahas been incalculable for postcolonialism, it must be recognized that their pre-eminence as postcolonial theorist has not benn uncontroversial or undisputed. Their many critics, including the Indian scholar Aijaz Ahmad and the Turkish-born US academic Arif Dirlik, are especially exercised about the socio-geographic positions occupied by this group. These critics contend that, while ostensibly concerned with Third World oppression and with championing marginalized forms of knowledge, postcolonialism's most powerful theorists are effectively secured their careers through the theorizing of oppression.