Knowledge in English
Napolean-A Biography
"McLynn's life of Napoleon traces his extraordinary career, as well as the Promethean legend he bequeathed, from his Corsican roots and the influential Bonaparte dynasty, through the years of the French Revolution and his military triumphs to his coronation in 1804 and his ultimate defeat and imprisonment.
Arya Sunil
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
R. L. Stevenson’s novel ‘The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ set in late 19th century Englandis an example of Victorian fiction.The novel explores the strength of human ability in the field of science. The novel is composed of various elements like allegory, gothic novel and Victorian literature.The novel starts with the name of the character and their social status.All throughout the story there is a blurring between the rich and the poor. There is a lot of sexual undertone that is subtly hinted in the novel.The novel could also be an allegory for drug addiction which was a major problem in the Victorian era. There is a third person omniscient voice which is authorial. The novel tells us about the fine line between the supernatural (gothic) and the material (science) world.The chapters are episodic in nature and there is a slow reveal of the events. The story revolves around the duality of the central character.Mr Utterson, aprominent lawyeris a unique character and represents the ideals of a Victorian gentleman. We see the incidents through his point of view. We believe his theories because of hisserious nature. The story revolves around Mr Utterson trying to find out what is going on between his friend Dr Jekyll and the mysterious Hyde who is a murderer.R. L. Stevenson has chosen the names of the characters through the emotion that it evokes on hearing them like Utterson or Hyde. The ‘Story of the door’ indicates spaces. The various themes of the novel are friendship, fight between good and evil and science versus nature. Dr Jekyll was a member of the upper class who was like by his peers. He had a dark wild side to him. He concealed his pleasures for the sake of his career and conformed to Victorian society. He felt like an imposter within his own body.He was torn between his attempts to be good and his evil fantasies.He wanted to embark on immoral adventures and escape social judgement.He finds out about the duplicity of life and wanted to separate his two natures and he creates a potion that lets him transform into Hyde, who is his evil alter ego.The only thing that connected Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are the memories that they shared. Their personalities were in stark contrast. Overtime Hyde appears as and when he wishes and Jekyll loses control over him.Although Jekyll is horrified by his actions, he continues to take the potion. Earlier he had to repress his true self, emotions to lead a restrained and respectable life. But now he lived his darker urges through Hyde.(1)Edward Hyde is everything Jekyll cannot be in fear of social criticism.Although Hyde was physically younger and smaller than Jekyll he awakens disgust and terror among people. Hyde gives an impression of deformity but with no nameable actual deformity. The words small and large were used to describe Hyde and Jekyll respectively and the audience subconsciously cannot conclude that they are the same person. The contrast between them is very sharp. What Jekyll did was unscientific and outside the bounds of social norms. There is a lot of emphasis done on sight. There are numerous arrays of documents which link to the story like the handwriting, cheque, key etc.The final chapter indicates the moral struggle of fate versus evil. Jekyll tapered with the supernatural and now had to pay for it. The heart of the issue unravels at a medium pace and then ends with the death of Jekyll.The final word of Jekyll’s letter indicates that Jekyll lives in writing even though Hyde had power over him. The true part of Jekyll dies when the letter is finished.There is no voice of the narrator or Utterson after this as Jekyll’s truth or his life is in his very letter which came to an end.At the end of the novel, there is a third voice which tells us about Jekyll and Hyde as separate people. They are divided by hatred. Jekyll was suffering from a deep identity crisis. Jekyll takes the final call and kills himself because Hyde faced charge as an outlaw. By the end of the novel, the voice shifts from that of a doting father to anger.This novel was an inspiration to comic characters like Dr Bruce banner and the incredible Hulk which portrayed the similar case of a split personality. (2)
Kartik Mathur
Persepolis
MarjaneSatrapi’s memoir, Persepolis, is an eye-opener of sorts. The book gets people thinking about how horrible the religious situation in Iran was back then. She also talks about some other issues through the book. Drug abuse for example. She brings out this awareness through her own past experiences, in this book. In this essay, I am writing about Marjane’s character and her talks with god. Through these meetings with god it seems like she is trying to tell us something more. Something about her beliefs in god and how they played an important role in the way she thinks.The main reason, to me, that people follow a god is for hope of a better day or maybe just anything that is hoped for. People, very often,believe that god will help us solve our problems when people should be solving them themselves instead. Gods give us hope without even saying a word. It is strange the way a god is so blindly followed. MarjaneSatrapi, I believe, has portrayed this characteristic in the character. The author shows us the hope that the character had in god mostly through the conversations they have together, but it feels like there is a different idea behind those scenes.The author could be conveying the idea of god not being the saviour of any situation but rather people themselves.I would feel that once, rather if, someone has realised that there is no hope even after all this prayer and worship they would understand or think about the more probable reality of the situation. But the reality of that situation is not as such. God is looked at as much more superior than any being on the planet, which is a very big problem. It could definitely make people feel like their existence is not that important, which in turn could make them not understand the importance of humans on the planet. It is like they put themselves down. In the first conversation between the character and god (Pg. 8, Persepolis), I believe, MarjaneSatrapiis bringing out the idea of how people, including herself, see it necessary to give god an explanation, and also how having the idea of god puts a certain kind of unnecessary pressure on the person worshiping. What is more interesting is the line used in the very next frame- “Except for my grandmother I was the only one who believed in myself.”(Pg.8, Persepolis). Considering the fact that god told her that he believed in her in the previous frame, it seems like MarjaneSatrapi is telling us that the character’s belief in god was already not so strong. The character even portrays this when god and her are talking and she keeps telling him to change the conversation even when he does, (Pg. 13, 14, Persepolis). Slightly after, after the character overheard her parents talking (Pg. 16, Persepolis), she tells god that she wants to take part in the demonstration and he is given a look of sudden shock, like what she was saying was horribly wrong. In the next frame he walks out, as if not interested in being a part of the demonstration. The author at this point, I believe, is bringing out the idea of god being the whole reason behind these riots, considering the fact that she is experiencing a religious war. Along with the idea of god and religion there has to exist the idea of a better and worse one, it seems.Often it is the idea of religion and god that give birth to the biggest wars, just like in the book. At the end of her conversation with her parents (Pg. 17, Persepolis), when she asks where god is, I think, is because she realised what the war had to do with, which is god, and her belief disappears. She entered a space of reality, the truth behind the situation. Even when the character talks about how god and Marx look alike (Pg. 13, Persepolis), it feels like she is trying to tell us that Marx was the one who should have been considered a god. Again, showing us how her belief in god was almost dead. The time MarjaneSatrapi faced these religious issues was when they were at their peak. Though, these issues still exist in Iran and many other parts of the world. Not with the same kind of violence as what we have read in the book, but as conservative as in the book.
Portrayal of emotion and dealing with serious conditions in Persepolis-The Sheep
Marjane Satrapi’s world of black and white in Persepolis gives the readers an idea about its seriousness from the very first page. The seriousness and the emotion attached with each chapter are different. As soon as one starts with “The Sheep”, the heading makes it look very humorous. One cannot expect seriousness from a chapter which has the image of two sheep in the heading, and when one reaches the end of this chapter, it seems to be one of the most emotional chapters in the entire book.The first page (Page-62, Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis) of the chapter shows young Marjane, her father and her uncle Anoosh in the single frame. The background is dark, a lamp and a painting can be seen around the small space and a small table with a cup of tea and a cigarette emphasizes on the very idea of a conversation taking place. There is a stool on which her father is sitting and a sofa which looks more luxurious than the tool and on which her uncle is sitting, it gives an image that he is their guest. The young girl is seen sitting on her uncle’s lap, it clearly shows how close she is and how strong a bond she is sharing with the man, not just because she is sitting on his lap but she is doing so in the presence of her father. The chapter’s first scene starts with an idea of showing seriousness, as the reader moves on to the different blocks in the same page they could see how it ends by shifting the whole attention to her crying and the two men standing in the background are zoomed out. It shows how Marjane concentrates on the emotions of a person.The next page of the chapter (Page-63, Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis) basically speaks about the personal life of the young girl which gets affected due to the situation of turmoil in her country. In this page not even once is the young girl smiling, as soon as she enters the frame walking there is a kind of unhappiness on her face. The second frame shows how one of the two friends of her tell about the other leaving the country and the young girl has an expression which shows the sign of thinking as well as the sign of bewilderment. In the third frame she tries to put forward a point of hers which she thinks can restrain her friend from going, but she remains unsuccessful. There is a kind of pattern shown in these blocks; the first row has three blocks or frames, which shows the passing of time in a fast and quick manner. The second row has only two frames; it shows how slowly the time is passing in the mind of the young girl, her conversation with her friend is given more space because in her mind that is one of the most precious thing as it also tells us that she likes him. The third row again has quick passing of time but the last frame is bigger as compared to the other two, as it is the end of her small tale of love and leads to an emotional breakdown. The last frame shows her in black, almost everything black and a point is made and an emotion is shown, an emotion, a feeling of separation. The second last page of the chapter (Page-70, Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis) is one of the most emotional pages of the chapter. The opening frame is only one, it shows the importance of the matter. It starts with her writing “that was my last meeting with my beloved Anoosh”, it gives goosebumps when this part is revealed. The news is also brought to us in the medium of a newspaper and not by any person as the newspaper is a trusted source and this kind of news is sensational to be on the front page. The usage of newspaper as a source of this news is to lay emphasis on the seriousness of the matter. The two bread swans gifted by him to her is kept over the newspaper as it shows how important he and his gift was to her. The second row shows her encounter with her god for the first time. The god, who is a white coloured creature, a sign of hope in the whole of the darkness means nothing to her now and she asks him not to come to her again. The page ends with her shouting in the last frame all alone. A sign of emotional outburst and also shows that one has to stand alone in the hardest of the situations and face it all by themselves as no god or any other figure will do actual help. The seriousness and the emotional part of the incidents are portrayed very carefully by Marjane in this chapter- The Sheep.
girls
I feel that the conversation taking place is between a mother and her daughter. I assume this because the mother is telling her daughter how to iron her fathers khaki shirt and khaki pants. The mother acts as a authoritarian figure as he keeps telling her daughter how she likes things to be done . It could be said that the mother could be giving advice to her daughter that she would need in her life . The mother is also protective of her daughter as she tells her not to speak to wharf – rat boys and she also tells her the proper way to dress so she doesn’t look like a slut. The mother in this narrative could also be a step mother as in many stories, step mothers are almost always portrayed as an authoritarian figure and don’t really like their step children. It could also be possible that the mother could have been preparing her daughter with the notion that she will be a housewife in the future and not a working woman. She keep explaining to her daughter on how to do basic household chores such as sweeping the whole house , cooking pumpkin fritters and washing and drying cloths rather than giving her advice on what she could do with her life in the future. The mother wants to make sure that she makes a good impression on others as she explains to her how to smile in front of someone you like completely , how t smile in front of someone you don’t like very much and how to smile in front of someone you don’t like at all. The mother Is also preparing her daughter for the hard ships she herself could have gone through such as heartbreak and also in case of unwanted pregnancies ,how to abort a child. The daughter very rarely gets a say in matters concerning her own life. The information that the mother is giving her is not for that day but for the rest of her life. The assumption that the daughter would be frustrated is an under statement as the mother is very commanding . The mother also wants her daughter not concentrate on her studies and she tells her not to sing benna in Sunday school. The information that the mother is giving are less advice and more like guidelines on how to
oedipus rex
The chorus is an integral part of a Greek tragedy. It helps form the structure of the play. It enters after the Prologue, appears at all climactic turns of plot and concludes the play with an exit song.The primary role of the chorus is to act as a moderator or commentator. It generally occupies the orchestral space between the stage and the audience, forming a physical link between the characters on stage and the audience. The Chorus helps move the storyline forward by introducing new characters and commenting on ongoing activities and events. Through its observations, the audience gets a new perspective and sees a fuller picture of the action on stage.The Chorus comments on and evaluates incidents, characters and themes and helps mold the audience's reactions. The Chorus also prepares the audience for what might happen next by its forebodings which may or may not come true. This adds to the dramatic tension of the plot.The Chorus is also used to convey the vision of the dramatist to the audience. Its songs, or odes, can range from prayers and lamentations to songs of joy and grief. Sophocles has used the Chorus to magnificent effect in Oedipus Rex. The Chorus in the play consists of twelve to fifteen elders of Thebes, who react to events as they unfold on stage. The Chorus is sometimes fearful, sometimes full of praise or advice for Oedipus, and its songs refer to a variety of moods and themes ranging from tyranny to blasphemy. There are five Choral odes in Oedipus Rex. Each comes at a dramatic point in the play and helps the audience interpret events. It also either articulates or answers questions that arise in the mind of the audience and modulates their response.The first Choral ode is sung just after Oedipus declares his resolve to find Laius's murderer. The ode has two parts. First that the Chorus is fearful after hearing the message from Delphi and the other lamenting the miseries faced by Thebes- "Countlessly, the city dies, No compassion's found. A deadly generation lies unpitied on the ground. Wives and mothers, young and old, lament by altar's shore pains and sufferings untold. Their mournful voices soar." (Page 14, Oedipus Rex, Sophocles)By describing in horrific detail the sickness and death that has befallen Thebes, the Chorus emphasizes how high the stakes are for Oedipus, their king. The second Choral ode comes just after the bitter quarrel between Oedipus and Teiresias, who accuses him of Laius' murder. This dramatic ode again has two parts, one, where the Chorus condemn the murderer and warn him to flee Thebes. This song further contributes to the atmosphere of terror and foreboding. In the second part, the Chorus is uncertain of Oedipus' s motives and yet is not sure whether or not to believe Teiresias"Though Zeus and Phoebus know and see everything that mortals do, to say the priest knows more than me is not entirely true." (Page 32, Oedipus Rex, Sophocles)This conflict in its mind is transmuted to the audience as well. But the Chorus remains steadfast in its loyalty to its ideal king, Oedipus.The third Choral ode is a moral and religious sermon, directed both at the characters on stage and the audience. The Chorus has full faith in the laws of the gods "May fate find me accompanied by purity in word and deed revering laws that walk on high, the children of the azure sky." (Page54, Oedipus Rex, Sophocles) It stands for the sanctity of divine laws and condemns pride and arrogance. The Chorus also deplores Oedipus’s and Jocasta's irreverence towards the Oracles. It glorifies self-restraint and piousness and is fearful for the tyrant who is proud and arrogantThe fourth ode comes, when, after Jocasta's departure, Oedipus is facing an identity crisis. This Choral song is an expression of loyalty towards Oedipus. The Chorus praises him to the point of deification and expresses gratitude to the gods that protect Oedipus. The Chorus celebrate his divine birth, ironically, just before the truth of his birth is revealed by the shepherd. "Who was your mother, child, disclose. A sprite hill-ranging Pan come near? .....found a son among his bright-eyed nymphs at play." (Page 68, Oedipus Rex, Sophocles)The fifth and final Choral ode comments on how short-lived human happiness is. It reflects on the role of fate in Oedipus's downfall, his past triumphs, and present misery "If Oedipus' s fate the test, no human state is truly blest." (Page 75,Oedipus Rex, Sophocles) The Chorus molds the mood and perspective of the play by its comments. It also conveys Sophocles's theme of fatalism by surrendering before the forces of fate and the gods as it laments how even the most powerful of men are ruined by fate.
Crooked lines
In The Crooked Lines by Ismant Chugtai, Shaman is the 10th child in a muslim family and she has been neglected both physically and mentally during most of her childhood. Her family had not explained to her about sexual desires and she was also excluded from public and private spheres. We will now see how that caused her to be sexually fluid and its effects and how were her first few relationships as a heterosexual womenHer sexual and romantic attractions and desires are not age specific or gender specific. As a child her wet nurse Unna had taken care of her but after she left she missed her “soft, warm bosom”( page 3, The Crooked Lines). When Manjhu, her sister started to take care of her she developed sexual feelings for her. She once caught Manjhu bathing and stared at her and even made her blush. Manjhu also complained to Bari Apa that Shaman was “ tickling her in a most unbecoming manner”( page 4, The Crooked Lines).Even in school gender did not seem an issue for Shaman. She could not form a biological bond with her biological mother so she was looking for a mother figure to have that bond with. She found that in her teacher Miss Charan or so we thought. She idealizes this mother substitute but also has unconscious repressions. She later developed sexual feeling for her and was obsessed with her and also often dreamt about sleeping in her bed. This proved to be her downfall as she was caught sleeping in Miss Charan’s bed and 3 days after the incident Miss Charan had left the school. Shaman’s desires had gotten the better of her and it left her in a dark place. Shaman’s desires did not stop as she then got into a love triangle between herself, Saadat and Najma. With Saadat and Najma being the best of friends and often talking for in her room, she often felt like the outsider in her own room. Slowly she started to have desire for Najma too and was often be overcome with the memory of “ the movement of Najma’s lips, and the pleats of her waist”( page 67, The Crooked lines). Najma also starts to see Shaman differently when at the fancy dress show she was constantly blushing at Shaman even though she was wearing a men’s attire.After Najma and Saadat, Bilquis was now Shaman’s best friend. Her time with Bilquis is ery important as it is she who tells Shaman that “ Apa Bi told we should be crazy about boys and not girls”( page 78, The Crooked lines). This was a turning point in Shaman’s life as this was a psychological shock and according to her, the idea of cross sex marriage was “ rubbish”. After this realization she was now forced to go on an alternative trajectory.Shaman’s sexuality is a key theme in the novel. Her transformation from being queer to being ‘straight’ is ambigious. Taking the term ‘ straight’ in reference, could the author be hinting at this ambiguity through the title ‘ Crooked Lines’?
Engineering English and communication
English is the basic communication language which often helps in interviews and also in daily life for the way of improving communication skills.
Nandoo Kashetti
Engineering English and communication
English is the basic communication language which often helps in interviews and also in daily life for the way of improving communication skills.
7C's of communication
the pdf contains the information about seven c's of communication
Shivansh Nigam
Language and Communication notes
This pdf contain notes on Language and communication, language identification etc. These notes are prepared by expert faculty and are reasonably easy to understand or grasp.
HARPREET SINGH
Latest examination paper
the pdf contains latest year paper of subject english for communication subject code - BT- 103