Unit 2: Comparative Literature

 

Unit 2:

4) Susan Bassnett, “What is Comparative Literature Today?” Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction. 1993.

1) Abstract

• Sooner or later, anyone who claims to be working in comparative literature has to try and answer the inevitable question: What is it? The simplest answer is that comparative literature involves the study of texts across cultures, that it is interdisciplinary, and that it is concerned with patterns of connection in literature across both time and space.

• Susan Bassnett gives a critical understanding of Comparative literature. She says that there is no particular object for studying comparative literature. Another thing is, we cannot give a definite term for comparative literature.

• Different authors of literature give various perspectives about comparative literature. The popular understanding of comparative literature means different cultures across the world, expressed in the history of literature.

2) Key Arguments

• Critics at the end of the twentieth century, in the age of postmodernism, still wrestle with the same questions that were posed more than a century ago:

“What is the object of the study in comparative literature? How can a comparison be the objective of anything? If individual literature has a canon, what might a comparative canon be? How can be comparatist select what to compare? Is comparative literature a discipline? Or is it simply a field of study ?”

• Susan Bassnett argues that there are different terms used by different scholars for comparative literature studies. Therefore, we cannot put in a single compartment for comparative literature.

• The second thing she argues is that the west students of 1960 claimed that comparative literature could be put in single boundaries for comparative literature study, but she says that there is no particular method used for claiming.

3) Main Analysis

• The comparative literature has been developed through the progress of the world and through various cultures of different continents. 

• Different cultures of the continents have played a vital role in comparative literature studies, be it European, African, American and Eastern so on.

• Matthew Arnold in his Inaugural lecture at Oxford in 1857 when said :

• “Everywhere there is a connection, everywhere there is an illustration.

• No single event, no single literature is adequately 

• comprehend except  about other events, to other literature.”

• Goethe termed Weltliteratur.Goethe noted that he liked to “keep informed about foreign productions’ and advised anyone else to do the same. It is becoming more and more obvious to me,” he remarked, “that poetry is the common property of all mankind.”

• Benedetto Croce argued that comparative literature was a non-subject, contemptuously dismissing the suggestion that it might be seen as a separate discipline.

• Wellek and Warren in their Theory of Literature, a book that was enormously significant in comparative literature when it first appeared in 1949, suggest that :

• “Comparative Literature …will make high demands on the linguistic proficiencies of our scholars. It asks for a widening of perspectives,

• suppression of local and provincial sentiments, not easy to achieve.”

4) Conclusion

• The comparative literature could not be brought under one umbrella unless it becomes a particular branch of the discipline of literature. There are a lot of efforts are being taken to study comparative literature through a common language that is done in translation, which is understood by all people.

• Comparative Literature has traditionally claimed translation as a sub-category, but this assumption is now being questioned. The work of scholars such as Toury, Lefevere, Hermans, Lembert, and many others has shown that translation is especially at moments of great cultural change.

• Evan Zohar argued that extensive translation activity takes place when a culture is in a period of translation: when it is expanding, when it needs renewal, when it is in a pre-revolutionary phase, then translation plays a vital part.

5) Todd Presner, ‘Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline’ in Ali Behdad and Thomas eds. A Companion to Comparative Literature’ 2011, 193- 207

1) Abstract

• This article focuses on the questions like it is essential that humanists assert and insert themselves into the twenty-first-century cultural wars, which are largely being defined, fought, and won by corporate interests.

• After five hundred years of print and the massive transformations in society and culture that it unleashed, we are in the midst of another watershed moment in human history that is on par with the invention of the printing press or perhaps the discovery of the New World.

2) Key Arguments

• Paul Gilroy  analyzed in his study of “ the fatal junction of the concept of nationality with the concept of culture ” along the “ Black Atlantic, ” voyages of discovery, enlightenment,  and progress also meant, at every moment, voyages of conquest, enslavement, and destruction. Indeed, this is why many discussions of technology cannot be separated from a discussion about formations of power and instrumentalized authority.

• N. Katherine Hayles, I find myself wondering – as we ponder various possible futures for Comparative Literature in the second decade of the twenty-first century – how to rouse ourselves from the “ somnolence [of] five hundred years of print ” (Hayles, 2002: p. 29). Of course, there is nothing neutral, objective,  or necessary about the medium of print; rather it is a medium that has a long and complex history connected to the formation of academic disciplines, institutions, epistemologies, and ideologies, not to mention conceptions of authorship and scholarly research.

• Nicholas Negroponte once asserted in his wildly optimistic book Being  Digital (Negroponte, 1995 ), for they always have an underbelly: mobile phones, social  networking technologies, and perhaps even the hundred-dollar computer, will not  only be used to enhance education, spread democracy, and enable global communication but will likely be used to perpetrate violence and even orchestrate genocide in  much the same way that the radio and the railway did in the last century (despite the  belief that both would somehow liberate humanity and join us all together in a happy,  interconnected world that never existed before)

                                   

3) Main Analysis

• Comparative Media Studies  

• Comparative Data Studies  

• Comparative Authorship and Platform Studies

4) Conclusion

It focuses on this twenty-first century in terms of digital humanities how we are doing comparative studies. After discussing various arguments, we come to know that to date, it has more than three million content pages, more than three hundred million edits, over ten million registered users, and articles in forty - seven languages  (Wikipedia Statistics). This is a massive achievement for eight years of work. Wikipedia represents a dynamic, flexible, and open-ended network for knowledge creation and distribution that underscores process, collaboration, access, interactivity, and creativity, with an editing model and versioning system that documents every contingent decision made by every contributing author. At this moment in its short life, Wikipedia is already the most comprehensive, representative, and pervasive participatory platform for knowledge production ever created by humankind. In my opinion, that is worth some pause and reflection, perhaps even by scholars in a future disciplinary incarnation of Comparative Literature.

Thanks😊

Unit 1: Comparative Studies

    1)Why comparative Indian Literature?

Abstract 

• The article is about Indian literature and why comparative Indian literature is necessary for the whole culture.

• Laudable though these attempts are in discovering the basic unity of the Indian creative mind,

• They are made at the risk of ignoring the plurality of expressions in our creative life.

• some so many scholars are talking about comparative Indian Literature.

• It is also talking about commonwealth literature.

• The article is also talking about Indian nation oneness & Indian language & Multilinguistic.

Key Arguments

• The world is Flat by Thomas Friedman.

• The world is political.

• The effect of Globalisation.

Main Analysis

• The time of Globalisation.

• The Globalisation in-laws and Human rights should be Global.

• The major issue of climate change.

• The difference between multiculturalism & parallelism.

Conclusion

• If we can talk about comparative literature so we can get the idea that it is global and focus on Multiculturalism and it is a test of time. In language, there are two multi-languages. Also, there are two systems of knowledge to get an idea of civilization.

2) Amiya Dev, "Comparative Literature in India." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 2.4 (2000)

1) Abstract

• To Believes that write in Sanskrit but also in other languages

• It has Direct relation with language.

• It is talking about post-structuralism.

• He comes with the idea of inter-literary ness.

• There are comparisons of languages.

2) Key Arguments

• It has Binary opposition, focusing on dialectical.

• The concept of the Hegelian and Marxist approach.

• The Unity vs Diversity.

3) Main Analysis

• Apriori location of comparative Literarure.

• The problem of looking at Indian literature as written in a single language Sanskrit.

• The single focus perspective is a result of both a colonial and post-colonial perspective.

• Gurbhagat sinh” differential multilogue’’

• A problem about the concept of mutuality

• Question of situs location/stance

4) Conclusion

• The people of India are working in 22 languages and there are 221 voices but there are some languages that are empty because of the importance of one language. Amiya Dev focuses on inter literariness.

• Example: The people of Canada is knowing only the Canadian language.

• French people is knowing the french language. so, every country has its own diversity.

3) Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta, “Comparative Literature in India: An Overview of its History”, Comparative Literature & World Literature, Volume 1 Number 1 Spring 2016

1) Abstract

•  The focus is on recovering new areas of non-hierarchical literary relations. 

•  An overview of the trajectory of Comparative Literature in India.

•   Rabindranath Tagore’s speech on World Literature and with a modern poet-translator as its founder.

•  Gradually Indian literature began to receive prominence.

•   While British legacies in the study of literature were evident in the early years, there were also subtle efforts towards a decolonizing process and an overall attempt to enhance and nurture creativity.

• Paradigms of approaches in comparative literary studies also shifted from influence and analogy studies to cross-cultural literary relations, to focus on reception and transformation. 

2) Key Arguments

•  A question of linking social and historical structures with aesthetics to reveal the dialectic between them.

•  The materiality of comparison, the multi-dimensional reality of questions related to self and the other and to arrive at networks of relationships on various levels. 

•  In the last few years, Comparative Literature has taken on new perspectives, engaging with different areas of culture and knowledge, particularly those related to marginalized spaces, along with the focus on recovering new areas of non-hierarchical literary relations. 

3) Main Analysis

• The idea of World literature gained ground towards the end of the nineteenth century when in Bengal, for instance, translation activities began to be taken up on a large scale and poets talked of establishing relations with the literature of the world to promote, as the eminent poet-translator Satyendranath Dutta in 1904 stated, “relationships of joy” (Dutta 124)

•  Tagore used the word “Visva Sahitya” and stated that the word was generally termed “comparative literature

4) Conclusion

•  In all its endeavors, however, the primary aim of some of the early architects of the discipline to nurture and foster creativity continues as a subterranean force.

•  The comparatist work with the knowledge that a lot remains to be done and that the task of the construction of literary histories, in terms of literary relations among neighboring regions and of larger wholes one of the primary tasks of Comparative Literature today has yet perhaps to begin. 

• Thanks😊

The Joys of Motherhood Novel by Buchi Emecheta

                                Introduction

Florence Onyebuchi "Buchi" Emecheta OBE was a Nigerian-born novelist, based in the UK from 1962, who also wrote plays and an autobiography, as well as works for children. She was the author of more than 20 books, including Second Class Citizen, The Bride Price, The Slave Girl, and The Joys of Motherhood.

The Joys of Motherhood is a novel written by Buchi Emecheta. It was first published in London, UK, by Allison & Busby in 1979 and was reprinted in Heinemann's African Writers Series in 2008. The basis of the novel is the "necessity for a woman to be fertile, and above all to give birth to sons". 

1. Double Colonization of women 

“There was far more to be gained by communication” (p. 63). By description, unity of action and blackness, in The Joys of Motherhood, demystify the common context of struggle among women of color in Igbo society. The constructed solidarity, in this regard, unifies them against the power structures, as Mohanty (2003) discusses in her theory. When Nnaife leaves for Ferdinando Po, Nnu Ego, who is pregnant, and her son, Oshie, live in poverty which is reinforced due to the economic pressure. “Oshie [is] lucky if he had a good meal a day”. (p. 103)

 He is gradually diagnosed to be ill. In this situation, we are told that “everybody gave [Nnu Ego] what they could and the greatest help was that the landlord told her to disregard paying rent for that month” (p. 106). This depiction, indeed, asserts the existence of solidarity not only among women but among all black people. The idea explores the fact that black men and women should struggle against racism side by side. Maybe, this extract justifies Emecheta as a black feminist and womanist because […] forerunners of Black Feminism…stimulate black women to love themselves, their race, and their culture and not to trap in white superiority or white beauty standards.

In the novel, Emecheta carefully depicts how the colonial discourse brings about changes such as religious ones in Lagos through the institutions: “the workers are determined to be off only half a day in the week and that is on Sundays to attend the church. The marriage should be done in the church, otherwise; it is regarded as an illegal marriage. When Nnu

Ego is pregnant for the first time, Naif becomes worried that he may lose his job because they didn’t marry in the church. Moreover, Nnu Ego, in the court, is told to swear by the Holy Bible, not by her chi”. (Emecheta, 2011, p. 217) Hence, Emecheta highlights how carefully the West develops its culture and rules through the institutions.

 She, indeed, echoes how women are subject to multiple oppressions by the intersection of oppressive forces of race, gender, and class. Emecheta, in this regard, attempts to speak for the disenfranchised African women who are subjugated by the colonial patriarchal society. Due to their own contradictory sex, race, class, and cast positioning, Third World women and women of color are subject to domination and exploitation (Mohanty, 2003, p. 64).

 Through disclosing the abusive behaviors with which the colonial patriarchal society has oppressed and silenced the female figures in Lagos, Emecheta criticizes the effects the colonial patriarchal discourse has on the native patriarchy. In this regard, Loomba (2007) mentions:

 Colonialism intensified patriarchal oppression, often because native men increasingly disenfranchised and excluded from the public sphere, became more tyrannical at home in her story, Emecheta questions such capitalist policy which leads to the immigration of many villagers, with no profession, to Lagos- a colonized city- to find a job: It was difficult for a man with no qualification to find work in early 1940. In growing numbers, they were leaving their village homes to look for jobs in Lagos, and this phenomenon was robbing many areas of their most able-bodied men. (Emecheta, 2011, p. 141)Indeed, Emecheta attempts to explore that women of color, however different, acknowledge that solidarity is the only way that constitutes their commonality within the power structures.

                                              Thanks😊

A Dance of the Forests Play by Wole Soyinka

                               Introduction 

Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka, known as Wole Soyinka, is a Nigerian playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist in the English language. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first sub-Saharan African to be honored in that category. Soyinka was born into a Yoruba family in Abeokuta.

A Dance of the Forests is one of the most recognized of Wole Soyinka's plays. The play "was presented at the Nigerian Independence celebrations in 1960, it denigrated the glorious African past and warned Nigerians and all Africans that their energies henceforth should be spent trying to avoid repeating the mistakes that have already been made. At the time of its release, it was an iconoclastic work that angered many of the elite in Soyinka's native Nigeria. Politicians were particularly incensed at his prescient portrayal of post-colonial Nigerian politics as aimless and corrupt. Despite the deluge of criticism, the play remains an influential work. In it, Soyinka espouses a unique vision for a new Africa, one that is able to forge a new identity free from the influence of European imperialism.

A Dance of the Forests is regarded as Soyinka's theatrical debut and has been considered the most complex and difficult to understand of his plays. In it, Soyinka unveils the rotten aspects of society and demonstrates that the past is no better than the present when it comes to the seamy side of life. He lays bare the fabric of the Nigerian society and warns people as they are on the brink of a new stage in their history: independence.

1. Past – present- future –
inter-connected (with reference to A Dance of the Forests)

A Dance in the Forests is an ‘atmosphere’ play that makes it rather difficult to understand textually. And like the other two atmosphere plays I have reviewed The Road and Madmen and Specialists, it is also heavily based on Yoruba mythology. In addition, the play incorporates many characters, some of which have a dual role as one section of the play is set in the past, at the court of Mata Kharibu, with these said characters acting a previous incarnation of themselves. There is a sense of timelessness within the play, between the present and the past, and the ever-present Dead Man and Dead Woman throughout time. There is also a sense of the ethereal in the interplay between the living, the dead, and the demigods. Clearly, there is a lot happening in a short span.

As an atmosphere play, there is no discernable plot. We are left with the characters and their motives, not all of which are clear in this jumble of activity. Yet for all its non-typical attributes, there is much to admire in the setup and the traditions and the myths. I feel Soyinka was aiming for a surreal journey where time and space are nowhere and everywhere simultaneously. And I can certainly see this pulled off with the right stage and direction and, possibly, an immersive setup. The ritual dances, the masks, the sudden bursts of energy would all go a long way in making it a unique experience.

Enter the beaters shouting. The flogger immediately breaks through them and sets out to clear a space with his long whip, which he freely exercises. The dancer follows almost at once, followed by his acolyte (a very intense young girl). She sprinkles the cleared space after the flogger. The dirge-man begins to recite within a few minutes of their entry. An assistant hands Agboreko the divination board, the bowl and kernels.]

Dirge-man: Move on eyah! Move apart

I felt the wind breathe—no more

Keep away now. Leave the dead

Some room to dance.

If you see the banana leaf

Freshly fibrous like a woman’s breasts

If you see the banana leaf

Shred itself, thread on thread

Hang wet as the crêpe of grief

Don’t say it’s the wind. Leave the dead

Some room to dance.

The mythology, as in many of Soyinka’s plays, centers around Ogun—the patron deity of poets and warriors, the god of creativeness and destructiveness. The play deals with the envy of a carver, Demoke, who is carving a giant silk-cotton tree into a totem for the festival of the gathering of the tribes in the forest; his fear of heights prevents him from reaching the top, however, Demoke’s apprentice, Oremole, climbs higher than he and in a fit of jealousy Demoke sends Oremole tumbling down to his death before lopping off the top of the tree. Demoke offends the deity Eshuoro of whom Oremole was a follower. So begins the rivalry between Ogun (Demoke’s deity) and Eshuoro, and the referee Forest Head.

Demoke: Envy, but not form prowess of his adze.

The world knew of Demoke, son and son to carvers;

Master of wood, shaper of iron, servant of Ogun,

Slave, alas, to height, and the tapered end

Of the silk cotton tree. Oremole

My bonded man, whetted the blades,

Lit the fires to forge Demoke’s tool.

And now he sat above my head, carving at the head

While I crouched below him, nibbling hairs

Off the chest of araba, king among the trees.

So far could I climb, one reach higher

And the world was beaten like an egg and I

Clasped the tree-hulk like a lover.

Thrice I said I’ll cut it down, thread it,

Stride it prostate, mould and master araba

Below the knee, shave and scrape him clean

On the head. But thrice Oremole, slave,

Server to Eshuoro laughed! ‘Let me anoint

The head, and do you, my master, trim the bulge

Of his great bottom.’ The squirrel who dances on

A broken branch, must watch whose jaws are open

Down below.

The focus tends to shift though from Demoke and his crime, to the confrontation between Ogun and Eshuoro, and to the Dead Man and Dead Woman who have been wronged in Mata Kharibu’s court (a shift to the past that helps explain the history between the characters living and dead), all of which indicates a build up to a natural catharsis—redemption—which never transpires. Instead, the play culminates in Demoke being the pawn of the deities and the sorrow of the Dead Woman. The resolution is unclear.

I state once again that in performance, the atmosphere, fluidity of movement and action, would indeed part a certain, unique experience. Or as Osofian adequately sums it up:

It was easy naturally to dissolve the fears of those who had only previously encountered the play in print, and concluded from their reading that the play was totally inaccessible. Even my cast began from such prejudices, until the play asserted its histrionic power, and surprised them with the richness of its theatrical possibilities. Soyinka is not made for reading, but for staging, for performance.

                                                                                                                                          Thanks😊

The Only Story Novel by Julian Barnes

              Introduction

Julian Patrick Barnes is an English writer. He won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 with The Sense of an Ending, having been shortlisted three times previously with Flaubert's Parrot, England, England, and Arthur & George. Barnes also writes crime fiction under the pseudonym, Dan Kavanagh. Click Here

Born: 19 January 1946 (age 76 years), Leicester, United Kingdom

Spouse: Pat Kavanagh (m. 1979–2008)

Influenced by: Gustave Flaubert, Jorge Luis Borges, Saul Bellow, MORE

Parents: Albert Leonard Barnes, Kathleen Mabel

Siblings: Jonathan Barnes

‘The only Story’ is a thirteen novel by Julian Barnes. It was published on 1 February 2018. The story is about nineteen years Paul Roberts and forty-eight-year-old Susan Machold. The story is mostly based on memory. This novel is divided into three parts. It is divided into first, second and, third-person narration. A story begins with the narration of Paul Roberts. It has a tragic end. The story has an unreliable narrator.

Originally published: 1 February 2018

Author: Julian Barnes

1) Memory Novel - Structurally as well as thematically

The short (273 pp.) novel is the life story of Paul Roberts, who we first meet as a 19-year-old Sussex University undergraduate returning to his parent's house in the leafy southern suburbs of London (Sutton, in Surrey, is suggested as a model.) The time is the early sixties, and there are a few references to current events. Paul joins the tennis club, which is one of the few opportunities such places offer for socializing. In random-draw mixed doubles, he is thrown together with Susan MacLeod, a 48-year-old married woman with two daughters older than Paul. Improbably, Paul and Susan become lovers and she eventually leaves her family to set up a house with Paul in South London. Having nothing to do but a little housekeeping, Susan soon descends into alcoholism and dementia. Paul departs and embarks on foreign travels, picking up jobs and women at random.

2) Postmodern Novel 

Julian Barnes, an outstanding English contemporary postmodern writer, a highly acknowledged novelist and the author of ten novels, two volumes of short stories, three collections of essays, and four detective novels was born in the family of teachers specialized in French who probably ignited his initial interest in French literature. Although he had studied law and qualified as a barrister he found much more pleasure in reviewing the books than defending a criminal. He might have rejected to stand for the rights of the criminals, but he decided to defend the rights of every living creature on earth or else to oppose them at all with his literary works which help us to recognize him as a postmodern humanist. Fundamentally, postmodernism stands for neither this point nor that one, it is both.  When he said in one of his interviews:  “I  don’t feel roots there,  I  don’t feel roots anywhere” [1, p. 9] might make us apprehend it as a territorial root on the surface but those who have read his works infer that he freed himself from any type of root that might relate him somewhere he doesn’t belong to with his heart. 

3) Theme of Love (Passion + Suffering)

Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question."

This sentence, which introduced this most recent book of Julian Barnes to his potential readers, was pretty much my Achilles heel from Page 1. I don’t quite understand how you can adjust the levels of love, like making marks on a burette and letting the content drip as per your desire of color and consistency of the final emotion. Quantifying love is beyond my comprehension.

And yet, there is a certain granular tenderness in this story of a young man and his (almost) thirty-year senior lover that prevents this love story from becoming a chore.

Seen in the rearview mirror during his twilight years, Paul reminisces the first time his 19-years old self fell for the 48-years old married Susan at a Tennis Court when the two were brought, fortuitously, together to team up for a mixed doubles match, and that his feelings were near immediately reciprocated. Ignited by this act that was both adventurous and liberating, Paul and Susan built walls around them, barricading their respective families with a dangerous, and often confounding, indifference and pushing this affair out of their current state, both literally and geographically. But at their new abode, which stripped them of their familial clutches, love gets suddenly exposed to the calamities of habituation, expectations, and aging. As a result, a whole new world sprouts between the two – one where they commence playing from different sides.

Barnes’ signature prodding into the delicate gossamer of human dilemmas and questionable foibles as much on display here although the narrative veered to the unpleasant edge of excess a good many times. Of the three sections the novel is divided into, the first was a watertight bag that didn’t allow for any of my emotions to blossom. The characters appeared like a bunch left unanchored on a theatre stage, waiting for the director to give them a cue. But beyond those 80 odd pages, Barnes plays his magic trick, and all of a sudden, the palette of love bursts open and renders an immersive experience. The turning points when love turns into duty, the duty into a burden, the burden into a gash, and the gash into a permanent scar, are the crevices where Barnes resonated the most with me.

”Love was by its very nature disruptive, cataclysmic; and if it was not, then it was not love.”

4) Critique of Crosswords

Crosswords is a kind of symbol that is very significantly used by Julian Barnes. there are two people are playing crosswords in the novel, one is Mr. Gordon Macleod and another is Joan. It is said that Crossword puzzles have several benefits: They can strengthen social bonds. Completing a crossword puzzle on your own is impressive, but you should never feel bad if you need to ask for help. They improve your vocabulary. They increase your knowledge base. They can relieve stress. They boost your mood. It was Paul Roberts who describe hidden aspects of these crosswords. It’s significance the leisure of British people. By playing this game people might think that they are solving the puzzles with the difficulties in life.

5) Paul - the unreliable narrator

“Everyone has their love story,” Susan once tells Paul. It may have been a fiasco, it may have fizzled out, it may never even have got going, it may have been all in the mind. But it’s their story, she says. “It’s the only story.” This, then, is Paul and Susan’s story.

Paul is a quintessentially alienated character. With no interest in either politics or religion and no particular ambition, he takes life as it comes. As he narrates his life in this book, he freely admits that memory is unreliable and he may not be telling us the truth.

6) Susan - madwoman in the attic

 while we’re about it, I may as well say that I once promised her there would always be room in my life for her, even if it was just an attic.’

‘Paul, I don’t want an attic in my life.’ And then she said it. ‘Especially not with a madwoman in it.’

Ultimately this is a beautifully written and, at times, moving novel. So why only three stars. Well this is just Barnes’ 4th novel since 2000. And whereas the other 3, Arthur and George (2005), The Sense of an Ending (2011) and The Noise of Time (2016) were all distinctive, this feels like too much of a re-working of past territory, particularly The Sense of an Ending, and without the Mcewanesque twist that elevated the latter to a worthy Booker winner (even if chosen by a rather unworthy Booker jury).

7) Whom do you think is responsible for the tragedy in the story? Explain with reasons.

Anything else on which you would like to ponder upon?

He, a 19-year-old university student; she, a 48-year-old married woman and a mother of two; they, in London’s suburban “stockbroker belt”, sometime in the 1950s. Their love was by its very nature disruptive, cataclysmic; but then, if it were not, it may not have been love, would it have? and Paul feels guilty that he wants to escape from all the things.

                                                                                                                                     Thanks😊