Assignment : 106 - 20th century Lit-1

 ASSIGNMENT 

Paper No : 106, The  20th Century Literature : 1900 to WW1

Topic : Orlando - A Biography by Virginia Woolf’s 

Name : Sangita Kantariya

Roll No : 19

Enrollment No : 4069206420210015

Semester :   MA- 02 

Year : 2022- 23

Submitted By : S.B.Gardi,

Department of English, MKBU

Orlando - A Biography : Virginia Woolf

Brief Introduction about Author

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) is recognised as one of the most innovative writers of the 20th century.  she was also a prolific writer of essays, diaries, letters and biographies. Both in style and subject matter, Woolf’s work captures the fast-changing world in which she was working, from transformations in gender roles, sexuality and class to technologies such as cars, airplanes and cinema. Influenced by seminal writers and artists of the period such as Marcel Proust, Igor Stravinsky and the Post-Impressionists, Woolf’s work explores the key motifs of modernism, including the subconscious, time, perception, the city and the impact of war. Her ‘stream of consciousness’ technique enabled her to portray the interior lives of her characters and to depict the montage-like imprint of memory.

While she is best known for her novels, especially Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), Woolf also wrote pioneering essays on artistic theory, literary history, women’s writing, and the politics of power. A fine stylist, she experimented with several forms of biographical writing, composed painterly short fictions, and sent to her friends and family a lifetime of brilliant letters.

Bloomsbury Group

The Bloomsbury group was a circle of artists, writers and intellectuals including Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa Bell, their brother Thoby Stephen, Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and Saxon Sydney-Turner. E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry also became prominent members of the group from around 1910.

Virginia and Vanessa moved from Kensington to Bloomsbury in 1904 after the death of their father, the celebrated writer and critic, Sir Leslie Stephen.The Bloomsbury Group are often better known for their unconventional personalities and lifestyles than for their art. What was it about them that outraged people at the time and still fascinates people today?

They came from wealthy backgrounds, which had given them social advantages and self-confidence. But they were linked by a spirit of rebellion against what they saw as the unnecessary conventions, restraints and double standards of their parents’ generation. They wanted freedom to develop their own ideas and lifestyles. They were politically liberal. They also had liberal ideas about sex, which meant there were often complicated relationships and affairs between the various members of the Bloomsbury circle.

Virginia Woolf’s Writing Style

Virginia Woolf was one of the first writers of the modernist period to write with the stylistic features of Interior Monologue and Stream of Consciousness. Because of her connection in helping to develop and refine these styles, readers and literary critics a like can pull these styles from most of her works throughout her life as a writer. 

Interior Monologue

Woolf commonly employs the techniques of interior monologue to distinguish between the public exterior and the private interior. Her use of this technique takes the reader from the expected view of outside the main character into their mind. She allows the reader to witness the innermost thoughts of her characters and to pull the story and character development from them. This style differs from any that had been seen before because all other writers focus their stories on the growth of characters from interpersonal interaction and external motivation. Woolf specifically wrote in the style of Indirect Interior Monologue, which means that she never let the characters thoughts flow without specific organisation and control.

Stream of Consciousness

As one of the pioneers of this literary technique, Woolf can be seen as one of the best examples of Stream of Consciousness writing. Stream of Consciousness is seen as a subset of the Interior Monologue, as it is seen from inside the characters mind, but it builds on the main premise. This style of writing is most known for it's flow of thoughts and images that do not seem to have any particular coherence to them). Stream of Consciousness works like the human thought process, the words and images move in a way that mimics this process and allows the writer to manipulate not only the conscious thought of their readers, but also the unconscious thought. This style of writing focuses more on the emotional and psychological processes within the character than the interaction with the physical world or with other characters. 

Orlando - A Biography

Orlando, Virginia Woolf's sixth major novel, is a fantastic historical biography, which spans almost 400 years in the lifetime of its protagonist. The novel was conceived as a "writer's holiday" from more structured and demanding novels. Woolf allowed neither time nor gender to constrain her writing. The protagonist, Orlando, ages only thirty-six years and changes gender from man to woman. This pseudo-biography satirizes more traditional Victorian biographies that emphasize facts and truth in their subjects' lives. Although Orlando may have been intended to be a satire or a holiday, it touches on important issues of gender, self-knowledge, and truth with Virginia Woolf's signature poetic style.

Woolf’s writing style in Orlando

Woolf tells the story of Orlando in the third person and from Orlando's perspective. Occasionally Woolf will talk to the reader directly as the author. Woolf does this to draw the reader away from the narrative and show how much the writer knows about her subject. As a result, when reading about Orlando's life, it is difficult for the reader not to draw comparisons with the author's own personality. Woolf is writing about a person finding her voice as an author and a women but in what she presents as a man's world. In that way, Virginia Woolf uses Orlando to directly communicate her own thoughts about writing and life. In particular, she articulates that men and women are both and share attributes. She suggests to be truly happy you have to find the right .

Theme of Orlando

Writing and Literature

Virginia Woolf was an important artistic contributor to the modernist movement of the 20th century, which sought to break from traditional forms of artistic expression. Modernists like Woolf believed that traditional forms of writing—be it poetry, prose, and even biography—were a poor fit for their new and changing world. The early 20th century saw sweeping changes politically, socially, and economically—and since the world was changing, modernists figured, so should art. Woolf’s Orlando is one such attempt to critique antiquated literary traditions and produce more innovative work. Woolf’s form is highly experimental, and she does not conform to any one single genre or category. While declaring itself a biography (narrated from the perspective of a fictional biographer), Orlando is also a biting critique of literature and writing. The subject, Orlando, is a poet, and the biographer repeatedly interrupts the novel to comment on their own writing. Throughout Orlando’s unbelievable life, in which he changes gender after a curiously long sleep and lives over 400 years, Orlando encounters several past literary “giants,” including William Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift. Woolf makes countless references to other literary works, and while she generally respects and pays homage to the past, she pokes fun at both herself and other writers. Through Woolf’s meta commentary and her satirical depiction of writing and literature in Orlando, she effectively argues that there is a pressing need for new forms of literary expression.

Woolf also pokes fun at Nicholas Greene, a famous writer and critic, who is stubbornly resistant to change and whose opinions hypocritically change with the times, in order to critique those who oppose contemporary literature in favor of glorifying more traditional forms. When Orlando first meets Greene during the 16th century, Greene slams his fist on the table and proclaims, “the art of poetry is dead in England.” Greene does not appreciate the new forms practiced by contemporary Elizabethan writers like Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe and prefers those from the classical age, which reflects a resistance to change and a reverence for traditional forms. Orlando again meets Greene during the 19th century. “Ah! My dear lady,” Greene says to Orlando, “the great days of literature are over. Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson—those were the giants. Dryden, Pope, Addison—those were the heroes.” Of course, these are the very same poets Greene criticized so harshly during their own time, which again reflects an overall resistance to new literary forms and a reliance on the old, but it also suggests that literary criticism is hypocritical and essentially meaningless.

 

This resistance to new literary forms is also seen in Greene’s criticism of Orlando’s own work. When Greene reads Orlando’s original play, The Death of Hercules, during the 16th century, he is exceedingly harsh and claims the play is “wordy and bombastic in the extreme.” However, when Greene later reads Orlando’s poem, “The Oak Tree,” during the 19th century, Greene insists it must be published. “The Oak Tree” reminds him of poets like Addison, and, Greene says, “thankfully,” it has “no trace” of “the modern spirit.” Greene is accepting of Orlando’s work only when it harkens to the form and “spirit” of past writers, not when it is original and experimental.

 

Orlando is deeply affected by Greene’s poor review of his play, and he slips into an overwhelming depression that lasts for decades. Orlando finally snaps out of his despair when he decides to reject Greene’s opinions. “Good, bad, or indifferent,” Orlando says, “I’ll write, from this day forward, to please myself.” Later, as a woman in Victorian England, Orlando is happy that Greene approves of her poem, but his approval has much less influence on her. She questions why critics make writers feel that they “must always, always write like somebody else,” and this appears to be Woolf’s overarching point. After all, Orlando is nothing like the biographies—or novels, for that matter—that came before it, and it is through this “wordy and bombastic” book that Woolf suggests literature and writing, particularly the writing of biographies, is in need of reimagining for a new and changing age.

 

Subjectivity, Truth, and Biography

In Orlando, Virginia Woolf implies that biographies of the past have failed to effectively capture a subject because they rely too heavily on what is perceived as objective fact. The book’s subject, Orlando, is a fictional character based upon Woolf’s real-life friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, and Orlando’s unbelievable life spans some 400 years. Orlando is also a history of English literature, and it was written specifically with Woolf’s elite circle of friends (each of them writers and artists), known as the Bloomsbury Group, in mind. Woolf has an incredible connection to Orlando—personally, culturally, and artistically—which serves to underscore her opinion that remaining completely objective when writing a biography is impossible. Furthermore, Woolf suggests that collecting and recording facts, such as is done in the writing of biographies, is difficult because to do so relies (at least in part) on another person’s memories, which are highly fragmented and specific to each individual. Thus, with the surreal biography, Orlando, narrated by a fictional biographer, Woolf at once argues the unreliability of memory, while claiming simultaneously that time and truth are ultimately subjective. A biography should, instead, capture the overall essence of its subject rather than attempt to make a strict account of specific events.

 

Woolf repeatedly draws attention to time’s subjectivity in Orlando, which, she asserts, makes the biographer’s job difficult. The narrator notes that Time (with a capital “T”) makes “animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality,” but it “has no such simple effect upon the mind.” An hour, the narrator says, “may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length”; or, “an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second.” The perception of time, then, is decidedly individual and circumstantial, not universal. Traditional biographies rely on a universal understanding of time, but the passing of time in Orlando is nearly imperceptible and would appear absent all together if not for the narrator’s mention of it. “Time passes” specifically as Orlando perceives it, not based on the clock. The narrator claims “the task of estimating the length of human life (of the animals’ we presume not to speak) is beyond our capacity.” Furthermore, “it would be no exaggeration to say” that Orlando can go “out after breakfast a man of thirty and come home to dinner a man of fifty-five at least.” Time, especially that of years, is incredibly subjective in Orlando. Individual moments have far more influence on Orlando than decades or even centuries, and as such, the novel often belabors a single minute but glosses over a hundred years. The narrator contends that “the true length of a person’s life […] is always a matter of some dispute. Indeed, it is a difficult business—this time keeping.” By the end of the biography, Orlando has lived over 400 years; however, Woolf does not mean to imply that people are capable of such longevity. Her point, on the contrary, is that Orlando is ultimately a mixture of everyone and everything that has come before her, such as her ancestors and the literature of the past. To adequately capture Orlando’s life, Woolf therefore argues, it is necessary to capture all that Orlando considers her life to be.

 

Woolf also interrogates truth in Orlando, which she does by way of Orlando’s search for truth through various means. However, Orlando ultimately learns that truth, like time, isn’t so concrete. Orlando chiefly looks for truth in poetry but is “despaired of being able to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is,” and falls “into a deep dejection.” Truth, it seems, can’t be found. Like time, Truth in Orlando is not universal, and it is not something that can be pointed to and written down, such as in a traditional biography or historical account. Truth is elusive and frequently changes, much like Woolf’s unconventional writing style. Orlando’s search for truth continues in the drawing room of Lady R., where the brightest and most famous writers and minds of the age gather. Lady R.’s intellectual gatherings have the reputation of hosting “genius,” and Orlando hopes to discover truth and “profundities.” But nothing profound is ever said and Orlando leaves bored. Truth, in this case, is an “illusion,” and at times “does not exist” at all. As such, factual truth is sparse in Orlando, and Woolf instead relies on Orlando’s personal truth, which, she argues, more adequately captures the essence of Orlando’s life. The most prominent, and perhaps most puzzling, moment of truth within Orlando is the point in which Orlando first wakes having transformed from a man into a woman. “THE TRUTH!” the narrator declares in capital letters. “Truth! Truth! Truth!” the narrator repeats. “[Orlando] is a woman.” Many in the novel set out to prove that Orlando was a woman all along, or that she is indeed not a woman now, but the fact remains that Orlando had been a man and is now a woman. Actual truth, Woolf implies, is often unbelievable and not accepted across the board.

Gender and Society

In one of the more surprising moments of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Orlando wakes after an inexplicable coma-like sleep of seven days to find himself transformed into a woman. Orlando is the fictional representation of Woolf’s own friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, and Orlando’s seemingly easy transition from male to female reflects Woolf and, presumably, Sackville-West’s, own understanding of gender. Both Woolf and Sackville-West were members of the Bloomsbury Group, an elite group of writers and artists who questioned and openly resisted traditional assumptions of gender and sexuality. Orlando—or Vita, for all intents and purposes—possesses both male and female qualities and has affairs with both men and women, completely disrupting popular gender stereotypes along the way. People are perceived differently in Orlando, and, Woolf implies, in broader society as well, based on what gender they are; however, many of the characters in the novel are androgynous and their receptions change with their assumed genders. Through this rather fluid depiction of gender in Orlando, Woolf implies that the dichotomous male-versus-female understanding of gender is merely a social construction, and that no one person is wholly one gender or the other.

Identity and Transformation

Orlando, the protagonist and title character of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, undergoes profound personal and physical changes in the novel, and he lives in a world that likewise drastically transforms. When the narrator first introduces Orlando, he is a young boy of 16 in Elizabeth I’s court, sometime around the mid-1670s. By the end of the novel, however, Orlando is a 36-year-old woman who gets out of her car on “the twelfth stroke of midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-eight.” Orlando lives through incredible changes of time and place, and even mysteriously changes gender. “What the future might bring,” the narrator declares, “Heaven only knew. Change was incessant, and change perhaps would never cease.” Despite the changes in both Orlando and the world, however, the person Orlando is deep down remains consistent. He begins the novel as a poet who deeply loves nature and women, and that is exactly who Orlando is at the close of the novel as well. In this vein, Woolf effectively argues that regardless of social changes and personal transformations, who one is—that is to say, one’s identity—remains the same.

Thank you

Assignment: 110 History of 20th century literature

 Assignment 

Paper No: 110 History of 20th century literature 

Topic: War poetry 

Name : Sangita Kantariya 

Roll No : 19

Enrollment No: 4069206420210015

Semester : MA Sem2 

Year : 2022-23 

Submitted by: S.B.Gardi Department of English MKBU 

War poetry 

War poetry is, simply put, poetry that deals with the subject of war. Often composed during a particular conflict, these poems are usually written by soldiers.

Siegfried Sassoon "The Hero"

“The Hero,” by the English poet Sigfried Sassoon (1886-1967), is one of the many notable lyrics Sassoon wrote in response to World War I. Sassoon himself was a war hero, known for his unusual bravery, but eventually he turned against the conflict which he came to consider as pointless and badly managed. This poem reflects his disillusionment with the war.

In this poem an officer delivers a consolatory letter to a grieving mother concerning the death of her soldier son, Jack. She is proud of her son’s glorious sacrifice— but, on leaving, the officer reflects wryly on Jack’s cowardice and incompetence in the line.

Jack fell as he would have wished / The mother said”: the stock figure of the grieving mother opens this poem: a familiar, emotive image of loss in war. Here, the mother uses an everyday euphemism for dying in war— “Jack fell”— that implies an honourable soldier’s death, falling in action.

“‘The Colonel writes so nicely.’ Something broke…”: Colonels, those responsible for a regiment of soldiers, wrote letters of condolence to the bereaved on behalf of the regiment. As Graves relates in ‘Goodbye to All That’, these letters were often a duty.

“‘We mothers are so proud / Of our dead soldiers.’ Then her face bowed.”: The mother speaks as if for all British soldiers: perhaps the consolation that she finds in doing so is in subsuming herself in the collective loss of all the mothers of the nation. At any rate, these words do seem more sentimental than authentic: their clichéd expression helping to repress, perhaps, the great grief of the woman.

“Quietly the Brother Officer went out”: ‘Brother Officer’ is an unusual term— an example of military language being used in a way that is jarring at the beginning of the stanza. The camaraderie of the army, the special fellowship of men in service is introduced into the poem here.

“…poor old dear …gallant lies”: these words imply a distance that the first stanza’s heartfelt scene did not hint at.

“While he coughed and mumbled…”: the officer’s awkwardness in passing on condolences is understandable. The reason for the officer’s embarrassment only later becomes obvious.

“brimmed with joy, / Because he’d been so brave, her glorious boy.”: the alliteration in these lines, expressing the devastation of the mother, is clever. The effect of the repeated ‘b’s is to convey her restrained tears and give a suggestion of tremulously spoken words— of repressing the need to cry, of blubbering.

“He thought how ‘Jack’, cold-footed, useless swine, / Had panicked”: it is interesting to note the recurrence of the name ‘Jack’ in Sassoon’s poems. Sassoon was known as ‘Mad Jack’ by his men because of his almost suicidal bravery in battle. To name the coward and object of contempt in this poem ‘Jack’, then, is an interesting turn. Perhaps this ‘Jack’ is a kind of alter-ego for Sassoon, as, in a sense, was ‘Mad Jack’; a guilty idea of another self against whom Sassoon opposed himself (as a poet-warrior, with some success).

“How he’d tried / To get sent home”: Jack has attempted to get a ‘Blighty’ wound— an injury that would get him sent home to ‘Blighty’, or Britain, in the slang of the time. This act of desperation— shooting oneself in the foot through sandbags, holding a hand above the parapet in a sniper zone, and so on— was not an uncommon recourse to those desperate to escape the Western front. 

“…and how, at last, he died, / Blown to small bits.”: the grisly contrast of the soldier’s death to the heroism supposed in the poem’s title is clear. ‘Jack’ is “blown to bits” by a shell or a mine: the plosive sound, ‘b’ echoing the sound of the explosive and its effect on the unfortunate soldier. The halting rhythm of the line, with pauses following each stressed word (“how”, “last”, “died”), lends a sense of inevitability to Jack’s end.

“And no-one seemed to care / Except that lonely woman with the white hair.”: The final couplet is explicit, objective and powerful. The illusion of the opening stanza is replaced two related scenes of devastation: the fragmented body of the dead soldier, Jack, and the tragic image of the “lonely woman with the white hair”.

Wilfred Owen

1893–1918

Wilfred Owen, who wrote some of the best British poetry on World War I, composed nearly all of his poems in slightly over a year, from August 1917 to September 1918. In November 1918 he was killed in action at the age of 25, one week before the Armistice. Only five poems were published in his lifetime—three in the Nation and two that appeared anonymously in the Hydra, a journal he edited in 1917 when he was a patient at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh. Shortly after his death, seven more of his poems appeared in the 1919 volume of Edith Sitwell's annual anthology, Wheels: a volume dedicated to his memory, and in 1919 and 1920 seven other poems appeared in periodicals. Almost all of Owen’s poems, therefore, appeared posthumously: importantly in the bestselling collection Poems (1920), edited by Siegfried Sassoon with the assistance of Edith Sitwell, contains 23 poems; The Poems of Wilfred Owen (1931), edited by Edmund Blunden, adds 19 poems to this number; and The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen (1963), edited by C. Day Lewis, contains 80 poems, adding some juvenilia, minor poems, and fragments but omitting a few of the poems from Blunden’s edition. Owen wrote vivid and terrifying poems about modern warfare, depicting graphic scenes with honest emotions; in doing so, young Owen helped to advance poetry into the Modernist era.

Dulce et Decorum Est

Dulce et Decorum Est" is a poem by the English poet Wilfred Owen. Like most of Owen's work, it was written between August 1917 and September 1918, while he was fighting in World War 1. Owen is known for his wrenching descriptions of suffering in war. In "Dulce et Decorum Est," he illustrates the brutal everyday struggle of a company of soldiers, focuses on the story of one soldier's agonizing death, and discusses the trauma that this event left behind. He uses a quotation from the Roman poet Horace to highlight the difference between the glorious image of war (spread by those not actually fighting in it) and war's horrifying reality.

Themes

The Horror and Trauma of War

Wilfred Owen wrote “Dulce et Decorum Est” while he was fighting as a soldier during World War I. The poem graphically and bitterly describes the horrors of that war in particular, although it also implicitly speaks of the horror of all wars. While it is easy to comment on the “horror of war” in the abstract, the poem’s depiction of these horrors is devastating in its specificity, and also in the way that Owen makes clear that such horror permeates all aspects of war. The banal daily life of a soldier is excruciating, the brutal reality of death is unimaginable agony, and even surviving a war after watching others die invites a future of endless trauma. The way Owen uses language to put readers inside the experiences of a soldier helps them begin to understand the horrific experience of all of these awful aspects of war.

In the first stanza of “Dulce et Decorum Est,” the speaker thrusts the reader into the mundane drudgery and suffering of the wartime experience, as the speaker’s regiment walks from the front lines back to an undescribed place of “distant rest.” This is not a portrait of men driven by purpose or thrilled by battle. Instead, they are miserable: “coughing like hags,” cursing as they “trudge” through “sludge” with bloody feet. They march “asleep,” suggesting that these soldiers are like a kind of living dead. The terror and brutality of war have deadened them.

While the speaker is clear that the life of a soldier is painful and demoralizing, he demonstrates in the second stanza—which moves from describing the communal “we” of a regiment to a specific dying man—that death in war is also terrible: barbarous, agonizing, and meaningless. In the first two lines of the second stanza, the speaker captures the terror and dumb confusion of facing a gas attack (a feature of Word War I combat, which had never been used to such a terrible extent before that war), with the movement from the first cry of “Gas!” to the urgent amplification of that cry (“GAS!”), which is then followed by all the men “fumbling” with “clumsy helmets.” The speaker then describes a particular man unable to get his helmet on time, “stumbling” and “flound’ring” like a “man in fire” while the speaker can only watch helplessly from within his own mask. This other soldier's death is mired in confusion and pain. There isn’t even an enemy to face; it is a physically agonizing death offering no ideal or purpose to hold onto.

The poem’s very short third stanza suddenly plunges into the speaker’s own mind. In doing so, the poem reveals another aspect of the horror of war: that even surviving war offers ceaseless future torment. The surviving speaker describes himself as seeing in “all my dreams” this man dying in agony. The speaker can’t escape this vision, which means he can't ever achieve the "rest" that was the sole positive thing mentioned in the first stanza. The speaker's sleep is permanently haunted by the trauma of the death he has witnessed.

Since the third stanza is written in the present tense, it indicates that these dreams never fade. The speaker, who has survived—perhaps for a moment, perhaps the entire war—is permanently scarred by this trauma for however long his life will last. The poem’s portrayal of the horror of war, then, is complete and total. It reveals all aspects of war—living through it, dying in it, and surviving it—as being brutal, agonizing, and without meaning.

Wind up 

War poetry, regardless of the era from which it originated, captures themes that carry across generations. It also seeks to create new language, which later generations use as a framework for understanding war history. For Decaul, poetry falls into two categories: visceral and meditative.

Thank you 

Assignment : 109 criticism

 

Assignment 

Paper No : 109 criticism 

Topic : Indian Poetics 

Name : Sangita Kantariya 

Roll No: 19

Enrollment : 4069206420210015

Semester: MA Sem2 

Year : 2022- 23

Submitted by : S.B.Gardi Department of English, MKBU 

   Indian Poetics 

Indian Poetic theory is very old and the most interesting literary as well as philosophical and cultural discussion of Indian or better to say Sanskrit Literature. Sanskrit is regarded as ‘Dev-Vani’ (the language of gods), not all folk can possess the ability to understand and read Sanskrit literature. Earlier, great Sanskrit scholars had expertise in describing things that are usually hard to observe in nature. The prosperous tradition of Indian aesthetics is said to have begun from Bharat Muni in and around 1st century.

                      As there is ‘Western Criticism’ and can be called ‘Poetics’ as a proper canon, similarly, in Sanskrit there is a particular canon of Sanskrit Criticism which is usually bannered as ‘Kavya Mimamsa’ and which acts like an umbrella for various schools developed by scholarly thinkers. The various schools or theories in Indian Aestheics are

From the ages, different scholars have tried to defined Kavya in different manners. Among them all, scholars have tried to discover soul of Kavya. Kavya is just like that one cannot easily define or give any punctuation marks indeed it is the experience of enjoyment. Aristotle has defined in his Poetics but it rather deals with simply two aspects or Rasas pity and fear, while Indian Poetic is easy and yet much deeper Poetics. Different Scholars have introduced various mimansas about poetics. Western Poetics deals with the result of the poetry while Indian Poetics deals with process of poetry. In Indian Poetics, external tools can help to understand poetry. According to Indian Poetics  “Literary Criticism is Literary Philosophy.”

The Sanskrit word for literature is SAHITY, which etymologically means coordination, balance, concord and contact. In the Indian Poetics definition of literature defined as kavya as Aristotle defines “Poetics”.  It enhances beauty and worth  but there is spine line difference between Indian Poetics and Western Poetics.

Schools	Founder	Text In which School is introduced
School Of RASA	Bharatamuni	Natyashashtra
School of ALAMKARA	Bhamaha	Kavyalamkar
School of RITI	Vamana	Kavyalamkarasutra
School of DVANI	Anandvrdhana	Dhvnyaloka
School of VAKROKTI	Kuntaka	Vakroktijivit
School of AUCITYA	Kshemendra	Aucityavichara

School of Rasa

In Indian aesthetics, a rasa (Sanskrit: रस) literally means "nectar, essence or taste". It connotes a concept in Indian arts about the aesthetic flavour of any visual, literary or musical work that evokes an emotion or feeling in the reader or audience but cannot be described.

What is RASA? 

“A blending of various Bhavas arise certain emotion, accomplice by thrill and a sense of joy is Rasa.” In the sixth chapter of Natyashashtra he explains NATYARASA and RASA as the soul of poetry.  विभावानुभावव्याभिचारी संयोगात रसनिष्पत्ति । 

He has mentioned nine Rasas in Natysastra with its colour and god.

श्रृंगार-वीर-करुणाद्भुत-हास्‍य-भयानका: । 

बीभत्‍सरौद्रौ शान्‍तश्‍च रसा: नव प्रकीर्तिता: ।।

Sentiments	Bhavas
Erotic	Attractiveness
Comic	Mirth
Furious	Furg
Pathetic	Tragedy
Odious	Aversion
Heroic	Heroic Mood
Bhayanaka	Horror
Adbhutam	Wonder
Shantam	Peace

Worthy to note that RASA comes out only because of these four BHAVAS Vibhav, Anubhav,  Sancharibhav, Sthayibhav and Sthayibhav. Natysastra is foundation of fine arts in India.

Vibhav	Anubhav	Sancharibhav	Sthayibhav
Emotions arises because of Vibhav	Reaction of Bhavaka	Comes and go	Mirth, love, sorrow etc.

There are four critics of Bharatmuni’s  Rasa theory and they have increased this concept.

Four Critics of RASA theory
Bhatta Lollata	Creationism
Shree Shankuka	Permissiveism
Bhatta Nayaka	Nepotism
Abhinavagupta	Expressionism

School of Alamkara

Alankara, also referred to as palta or alankaram, is a concept in Indian classical music and literally means "ornament, decoration". An alankara is any pattern of musical decoration a musician or vocalist creates within or across tones, based on ancient musical theories or driven by personal creative choices, in a progression of svaras. The term alankara is standard in Carnatic music, while the same concept is referred to as palta or alankara in Hindustan music. 

Bhamaha is the first who introduced alamkara poetics. Second and third chapter of KAVYALLAMKARA deals with 35 figures of speech.

Alamkara
Arthalamkara	Shbdalamkara
Vastava (Realistic)	Swdt (Eluviation)
Anupamaya (Comparison)	Slesa (paronomasia)
Astisaya (Exaggeration)	Citra (Pectoris)
Slesa (Coalescence)	Yamaka (Repetition)
	Anuprasa (Alliteration)

Mammata enumerates sixty-one figures and groups them into seven types like…

1.Upma(simile)

2.Rupaka(Metaphor)

3.Aprastuta Prasmsa(Indirect decription)

4.Dipaka(Stringed figures)

5.Vyatreka(Dissimilitude)

6.Virodha(Contradiction)

7.Samuccaya(Concatenation)

School of Dhvani :

Then he discussed about School of Dhvani.Dhvani means The suggestive quality of poetic language. Another regards to this sense of poetry next school of thinkers, known as SCHOOL OF DVANI headed by Anandvardhan. He points that it is not the literal, simple or direct and referential meaning that poetry properly expresses, but it suggests indirect and emotive meaning. Hence, through the words of a poem must be given their due importance and the same with regard to the literal sense the denote, yet both the words and their direct meaning to express itself. The theory proposed in Dhvnyaloka by Anabdvardhana is known as the name of “Dhvani”. ‘Dhvnyaloka’  is itself a huge compendium of poetry and poetics.

This is what we called "Figures of Speech".

·        Dhvani is inoexiatent.

·        Dhvani is something beyond the realm of words.

·        Dhvani is a product of inference and is to be include under Lksana.

(1)Abhidha – Direct meaning

(2)Lakshna – We have direct meaning but we have to take another one.

(3)Vyanjana – There is the existence of direct meaning yet we have to use another meaning of word.

School of Vakrokt

The theory of Vakrokti and its significance in Literature. It has much more resemblance to stylistics. Vakrokti is the theory of Language and the formation of words. It is the formation of two words-

‘Vakra’ + ‘Ukti’ = “Vakrokti’

"वेदग्ध्यभंगीभणिती इति वक्रोक्ती।"

Kuntaka is known as the orinator of this Sanskrit literary theory. Vakrokti is a theory of poetry which perceiveives poetry essentially in terms of the language of its expressions. Here Vakrokti turns  into beauty.

Kuntakawas a Sanskrit poetician and literary theorist of who is remembered for his work Vakroktijīvitam in which he postulates the Vakrokti Siddhānta or theory of Oblique Expression, which he considers as the hallmark of all creative literature. 

School of Aucitya

Kshemendra’s discussions of the principle of Aucitya is from the point of view of both the writer and the reader and is articulated in its given cultural and philosophical context. Kshemendra made aucitya spine elements of literarinmess. He defines aucitya as the property of an expression being an exact and appropriate analogue of the expressed.

We can see this aucitya with the connection of The Old man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway and Myth of Sysiphus by Albert Camus.

School of Riti

Acharya Vamana (latter half of the 8th century - early 9th century) was an Indian rhetorician.

Vamana's investigation into the nature of a Kavya is known as the theory of Riti.

Vamana's Kavyalankara Sutra is considered as the first attempt at evolving a philosophy of literary aesthetics. He regarded that riti is the soul of Kavya. He presented his formulations in the form of Sutras

indian aesthetics is Indian art evolved with an emphasis on inducing special spiritual or philosophical states in the audience, or with representing them symbolically. taste and mind. Rasas are created by bhavas. They are described by Bharata Muni in the Nātyasāstra, an ancient work of dramatic theory.

Thank you