English Language and Literature

  The Poem  My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains          My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains          One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,          But being too happy in thine happiness,—                 That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees                         In some melodious plot          Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,                 Singest of summer in full-throated ease. O, for a draught of vintage! that ...

 Rushdie's essay "Crash" is a response to Princess Diana's tragic death. He focuses on contemporary culture "in which the intensity of our gaze upon celebrity turns the famous into commodities… that has often proved powerful enough to destroy them" ( Rushdie, 138). And on the case of Princess Diana's destruction that is the fatal car crash, Mercedes becomes a befitting coffin for her body.  Rushdie begins his essay by giving the reference of J. G. Ballard's novel "Crash" and it's movie adaptation by Cronenberg with the same name. The story of this novel or movie was about symphorophilia; specifically car-crash sexual fetishism and it "caused howls from the censorship lobby" (Rushdie, 138) and was labelled as pornographic. The irony is, the same themes and ideas were present behind the car accident that killed Princess Diana, Dodi al-Fayed, and their drunken driver. Thus Rushdie thinks the story of Princess Diana is not a ...

       According to Keats, an ideal poet “has no self…it has no character” and this identity less character is earned by suffering in thousand diverse ways. In Hyperion, Apollo is the ideal poet as he had suffered the most, more than the dethroned Titans. By suffering intensely the poet god becomes “a sage; /A humanist, Physician to all men” (“The Fall of Hyperion,” I, 189 – 190). In his letter to Richard Woodhouse (in October 27, 1818), Keats explained his concept of ideal poet. According to him, the ideal poet has no identity, “it has everything and nothing – it has no character…What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the chameleon poet…most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no identity”. To become an identity less ideal poet one must experience other’s suffering and pain. It seems Keats was obsessed with pain and death and he had his reasons. Keats was intimately familiar with pain, loss, feverish suffering and death. He spent six years s...

      The creation of robots and artificial intelligence is a topic that is popular in contemporary art music and film. Today fiction and reality feel closer to each other than ever. In 2018, Claire Boucher (also known as “Grimes”) released her song “We Appreciate Power” in which she sings “you are not even alive, if you’re not backed up on a drive” referencing the idea that brain uploading is the future of humanity. However, there is an interest in artificial intelligence in general, there is more specific fascination with the artificial woman and throughout the history of films men’s idea of being able to create “the perfect woman” has been depicted extensively. For example we can go back to German expressionism in 1927 when a film like “Metropolis” was created. In this science fiction, the inventor C. A. Rotwang creates a human-like machine in the form of a female body. Similar films are still being made even today such as the movie Ex Machina (2014) in which a robot i...

Q-THE  PERIODICAL  ESSAY   Introduction: The  periodical  essay  and  the  novel  are  the  two  important  gifts  of  "our  excellent and  indispensable  eighteenth  century"  to  English  literature.  The  latter  was  destined  to have  a  long  and  variegated  career  over  the  centuries,  but  the  former  was  fated  to  be born  with  the  eighteenth  century  and  to  die  with  it. This  shows  how  it  was  a  true  mirror  of  the  age.  A.  R.  Humphrey  observes  in  this connection: "If  any  literary  form  is  the  particular  creation  and the  particular  mirror  of  the  ...