The Scholar's Life,Ec-302,Research Methodology

Name                -     Bhatt. Dhara. J

Roll no:             -     02

M.A.Part-2       -     Sem-3

Paper                -      02, Ec-302

Paper name     -     Research Methodology 

      

Topic for Assignment  -

                 The Scholar’s Life

Submitted To: Dr.Dilip Barad

  Department of English,

  Bhavnagar university,

  Bhavnagar.                  

 The Scholar’s Life

      That academicals honors, or any others should be conferred with exact proportion to merit, is more than human judgments or human integrity have given reason to expect.

                                            -Samuel Johnson, a Journey to the Western Isles (London, 1774)

Ø     Introduction

        Literary scholars never cease being scholars. Today the majority of them earn their living as members of teaching faculties in colleges and universities throughout the world. As such, they have responsibilities quite remote from pursuit of knowledge. But in the midst of alien affairs that necessarily command their talents and energies as teachers, administrators and academic committee members, and in their private roles as spouses, parents, and participates in community activity and other good works, scholars cannot suppress, even if they wished to do so, that portion of their consciousness that insists on asking questions about literary matters and seeking answer. Their literary awareness keeps twenty four hours days: the bookish excitement that has attracted them to the professions in the first place permeates their lives. 

                  It is now almost a century since literary studies began to be professionalized that is, transformed form an vocation pursued by persons who made their living as culture journalists British civil servants, or in other occupations, into what has become a highly organized and sophisticated intellectual discipline centering in the academy.

                  Professionalized literary scholarship is now old enough to posses its pantheon of revered figure, most (but not all) of who were teachers in American institution of higher learning or were their counterparts in British universities:

Douglas Bush, E.K.Chapmbers, R.W.Chapman, Helen Gardener, W.W.Greg, Howards Mumford Jones, George Lyman Kittredge, Roger Sherman Loomis, A.O.Lovejoy, John Livingston Lowes, Kemp Malone, F.O.Matthiessen, Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Perry Miller, Frederick Pottle, Karl Young…..  

                We have met many such names, and those of many of their students and successors, in the pages of this book.

                    Some historian and critics of our profession claim for the early formative decades a now lost breath of learning and intellectual rigor. Wayne Booth, for instance, has regretted the proliferation of dissertation topics that concentrate on the formal aspects of literary texts ‘Isolated from the influences of ethics, polities, history, logic, dialectic, and even grammar.’

Other, like Robert Scholes, consider the narrowing of focus to have occurred in another way,

“Bracketing out certain domains of textuality in order to concentrate on others” 

·       First Excluding,

“All those uses of the English language that were utilitarian or speculative, retaining only those that could be covered by such designation as “oratory” so that all that remained was ‘belles letters’” and then deleting “oratory” so that all that remained was “ ’belles letters’ alone, which we learned to call by the focused honorific title of ‘literature’”

Ø     The Scope of English Studies

The scope of English studies now also includes writing theory and pedagogy. At the same time, the meanings of that eternally slippery word “meaning” have been drastically redefined. It is quite likely that some of the “immortals” mentioned above would today scarcely recognize the profession of English studies they helped found and develop.

Precise figure on the present size of the profession are hard to come by, but because it constitutes the largest component of the umbrella organization, the Modern Language Association, some indication of the letter’s size can suggest the magnitude of the former.

The figures, impressive in themselves, do not reflect another form of communal scholarly activity, the score of conference of special-interest grope that are held each year, with their own array of prepared papers and discussion. Yet despite all this elaborate programming and, in the case of the MLA, bureaucratic infrastructure the study of literature remains at base an intensely private pursuit. No one ever entered the profession burning with a single-minded ambition to read papers before an audience of peers or to see his or her original ideas on a literary topic printed in a learned journal. They may not earn as much or enjoy as much social status as do their contemporaries in other line of work, but they have the sharper satisfaction of having a vocation that enables them to do what they most want to do life.

Ø      Company of Books

   Literary scholars probably are no more gregarious than those in other lines of work. Nonetheless, our bond of common interest, of commitment to the humanistic ideal in general and in particular to literature as queen of the arts, is a peculiarly strong one.

Love of book and consuming interest in the intellectual and esthetic questions they pose unite persons with amazingly different backgrounds and tastes. In scholarship there is no prejudice born of national origin, creed, color or social class: we live in truest democracy of all, the democracy of the intellect.

In research, then, there are numerous perquisites: the constant company of book, the pleasures of travel, and the unlooked for adventure, the frequent encounter with delightful and helpful people. But we earn our perquisites with obligations. Like all professions ours has its code of manners and ethics, the heart of which is the proposition that we are working together for benefit of society, not for private aggrandizement. Scientists and inventors have their patents, but in humane learning all knowledge is in the public domain.

Various libraries, moreover, have their own regulations about the use of unpublished documents in their possession. But there is no room in scholarship for the person who, having discovered or gained access to a body of documents or other as yet undistributed information claims squatter’s rights. Although no professional statute governs the matter, it is generally agreed that the possessors are entitled to exclusive rights to the use of their material only so long as they are actively working towards publication. But if they simply sit on their claim indefinitely, meanwhile refusing to let any other, more energetic, scholar mine it, such action contravenes the very spirit of scholarship.

This plea is not as altruistic as it might seem. The same treasury of wisdom that deplores a dog’s bread growling over his bone also urges one to cast one’s bread upon the waters, and the idea is this: one who cooperates, get cooperated with. The lists of acknowledgement found in many book are proof enough extra information and in reading other people’s manuscripts with an expert eye for errors of fact or interpretation.

Ø  Two Principles Emerge

·     First

First, let others know what you are working on. Don’t Worry about boring them: if you are genuinely excited, your excitement to bind to be contagious. Time after time, as a result, you will receive valuable tips:

“Have you seen this article in the new speculum? I know you are doing usually expect anything related to your book to turn up there, but ….”Or,

“I was thinking over what you were talking about day at lunch, and I seem to remember that in the Berg collection…”

·     Second

               The second principle is corollary two first: keep up with what other people are doing, not only in your own filed but in others as well. Maintain the same interest in their research that you hope they have in yours. If you run across something that might have escaped their attention, drop them a note.

                    Our profession has no room for intemperate criticism of any kind, least of all in print. Differences of opinion there will always be, and scholarly competence not being a gift distribute equally among all practitioners, lapses of judgment and imperfections of knowledge will sometimes call for comment. Otherwise literary study would stagnate, complacent in its intellectual lethargy and spotted with uncorrected errors. But the necessary process of debate and corrected can, and should be conducted with dignity and courtesy.

                           Thus our profession has ethical standards that while unwritten, are as binding as the Hippocratic Oath and bar association’s canons. They are sustained by the desirability of fair plan self-respect, and professional morale. In the midst of a culture that is often said to be more materialistic and anti-intellectual than any other in history. We something are discouraged and may share the belief so prevalent in the world outside, that our achievement have an unreal quality, or, if they are real, at least they are furtile: that they add nothing to the sun of human wisdom or happiness.

Ø We gladly learn, but outside the classroom many of us are curiously uninterested in teaching many modern critics and scholars have developed the habit of taking only to each other, neglecting the border audience educated people. Perhaps the sustained indifference even at times open hostility of the provocation, we have much to answer for if we accept the notion that we are doomed to be forever talking to a virtually empty house.

                                              If the humanities, including the study of literature, are in perennial crisis more so at the present movement, perhaps, than ever before and the outlook for their survival grim, blame must lie as heavily on us, their appointed agents, for our lock of enterprise, as on the supposed unreceptiveness of the prospective consumers.

                                  It is our responsibility to seize every opportunity to communicate with lay audience, assign book reviews or in articles and essays in the popular press on history, biography and culture. Our contribution   as scholars in this regard is only a slights modification of our essentially two fold task in the classroom: to educate students at all levels to read, write, and think, developing in them the intellectually curious habit of mind that casts a disinterested eye over all important issues, appreciating their complexities: and to lead student by extensive reading and critical analysis of recognized writers and thinkers, and ancient and contempary inside and outside the mainstream, to seek, in Matthew Arnold’s Words,

                “The best that is known and thought in the world”

   For the purpose of crating in their own lives a “current of new and fresh ideas” appropriate in this, our time.

Ø      Those Groundbreakers in the profession 

                    Those groundbreakers in the profession, the commanding figures during the “golden age” then research dominated English studies from the 1960s, through the 1960s, thought of themselves as being and first and foremost explor5e of literary history and biography whose great design was to add to the world’s store of literary knowledge to provide the factual material by which they, and ideally the reading public at large, might better understand and evaluate a work of art.

         Alternative system for reading and interpreting literature developed from late 1940, onward: “New Criticism” exemplified by the work of Cleanth brooks, John Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate, and then successively, the work of Northrop Frye with its revised concepts of irony and myth, and the first manifestations of what were become the multiple strains of structuralism.