The Role of Culture in Orientalism

Introduction 

Edward Said was an American literary critic, post-colonial theorist, and political commentator. His book The Orientalism was published in 1978. It is considered to be his most influential work and has been translated into at least 36 languages. Critics called it, INAUGURATING THE POST-COLONIAL FIELD. 

"Orientalism revolutionised the study of the Middle East and helped to create and shaped entire new fields of study"

Orientalism and Culture 

Orientalism is a Discourse about the orient associated with the military and economic domination of the orient by Europe. 

There are two terms: 

1. The Orient: the East 
2. The Occident: the west 

Orientalism is directly connected with the history of post-colonial countries. It is the study of a debate with historians and scholars. It is indeed the exaggeration of differences about the Western superiority and the analytical models of perceiving the orient world. It is the source of the inaccurate cultural representation that form the foundations of Western thought. There are three aspects of Orientalism in this manner: 

1. Orientalism is a particular way of thinking that contrasts the orient and accidents. 
2. Orientalism is an academic discipline. 
3. Orientalism is a corporate institution for dealing with the orient. 

Reflection on Literature

The way Western people represent Indian culture or the Eastern culture is not what actually the Eastern culture is. The differences seem to be on an extent level. One Poet rightly says, 

East is East and West is West, 

And never shall the twin meet. 

_Rudyard Kipling

The Ballad of East and West

Conclusion

Thus, The Orientalism by Edward Said shows how certain assumptions of the Western world lead to the misinterpretation of the cultural symbols of the Orient. 

Stanley Fish's theory Interpreting the Variorum

Introduction 

Stanley Fish is a leading exponent of American ‘Reader-response’ criticism. His book on Milton Surprised by Sin was subtitled, ‘The Reader in Paradise Lost’. Fish argues that the reader in the book is constantly lured into mistakes of interpretation by the ambiguities of Milton’s syntax, and thus compelled to recognize his own ‘fallen state’.

INTERPRETING THE VARIORUM

In the essay INTERPRETING THE VARIORUM Fish questions New Criticism’s efforts to locate literary meaning in the formal features of the text, rather than on the author’s intention or the reader’s response— “The intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy”— and argues: Both authorial intention and formal features are produced by the interpretive assumptions and procedures the reader brings to the text. Authorial intention and formal features have no prior existence outside the reading experience. Fish’s arguments have affinities with the reception theory of Wolfgang Iser and with Derridean theories of discourse.

The essay has 3 parts. 

1) The case for reader-response analysis 

2) Undoing the case for reader-response analysis

3) Interpretive communities 

In the first part Fish presents a bad model of interpretation that had suppressed what was really happening. In the second part, Fish says that the notion of “really happening” is just one more interpretation. In the final section , Fish argues the need for interpretative communities. It is an explanation for the differences we see and the fact that the differences we see are not random or idiosyncratic but systematic and conventional.

The Reader 

Fish says that in the course of following the meaning of a text, the reader’s activities are at once ignored and devalued. They are ignored because the text is taken to be self sufficient— everything is in it—and they are devalued because when they are thought of at all, they are thought of as the disposable machinery of extraction.

Fish urges a procedure where the reader’s activities are at the centre of attention; where they are regarded not as leading to meaning but as having meaning. Reader’s activities include—

o The making and revising of assumptions 

o The rendering and regretting of judgements  

o The coming to and abandoning of conclusions

o The giving and withdrawal of approval 

o The specifying of causes 

o The asking of questions 

o The supplying of answers, the solving of puzzles 

Interpretive communities 

If interpretive acts are the source of forms rather than the other way round, why isn’t the case that readers are always performing the same acts or a sequence of random acts, and therefore creating the same forms or a random succession of forms? How, in short, does one explain these two ‘facts’ of reading?

1) The same reader will perform differently when reading two different texts.

2) Different readers will perform similarly when reading the same text. 

Interpretive strategies are not put into execution after reading; they are the shape of reading, and because they are the shape of reading, they give texts their shape, making them rather than, as it is usually assumed, arising from them. Interpretive communities are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions. In other words, these strategies exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than the other way around.

The case for reader-response analysis

The first two volumes of the Milton Variorum Commentary have appeared. Commentators have expressed different opinions on some of the points of disputes in the poems.

o What is the two handed engine in ‘Lycidas’?

o What is the meaning of Haemony in ‘Comus’? 

There are many other problems connected with the pronoun referents, lexical ambiguities, and punctuation. The editorial procedure always ends in the graceful throwing up of hands or in the recording of a disagreement between the two editors themselves. In short these are problems that apparently cannot be solved.

Fish says that these problems are not meant to be solved but to be experienced. Any attempt to determine which of a number of readings is correct will necessarily fail. Fish tries to solve the problems in some of the sonnets. He takes three sonnets of Milton.

Twentieth sonnet:- “Lawrence of Virtuous father Virtuous son”. The poet invites a friend to join him in some of the pleasures. It is a neat repast intermixed with wine, conversation and song, a respite from all hard work because outside the earth is frozen. But the problem is in the last two lines:

“He who those delights can judge, and spare To interpose them oft is not unwise”. 

The focus is on the word ‘spare’. Two interpretations are possible—‘leave time for’ and ‘refrain from’. In one reading the ‘delights’ are recommended. He who can leave time for them is not unwise. In the other, they are the subjects of a warning—he who knows when to refrain from them is not unwise. Two critics A.S.P. Woodhouse and Douglas Bush express opposing views on the meaning of ‘spare’. Bush reviews the evidence marshalled by Woodhouse, but draws the exactly opposite conclusion.

Conclusion 

Thus, Stanley Fish elaborates the concept of reader and the interpretive communities of readers in his work Interpreting Variorum. He enlighten the relationship among author, text, reader and the interpretive communities of readers. 

What is an Author? @Michael Foucault

Michel Foucault is not a Freudian, Marxist, Socialist, Structuralist or a Literary Theorist but a post-structuralist thinker. However, he draws on ideas and assumptions from them.

His Works

Mental Illness and Psychology 

Madness and Civilization 

The Birth of the Clinic 

The Order of Things 

According to him, his primary concern is not to analyze the concept of authors throughout the ages but to show their relationship with the text. He tries to figure out how a text points out to a figure who is outside and proceeds with it. His What is an Author? was originally a lecture he had delivered in 1969 at College de France on 22nd February 1969. It talks about the relationship between author, text, and reader. It was a response to Ronald Barth's The Death of the Author (1967) 

“What Matter Who is Speaking” -Samuel Beckett

This statement creates an indifference between author and text i.e. an author has no role in a text. According to Foucault, it is unethical because it has been adopted very much but not applied fully. However, as a principal, it dominates our writing as we focus on finished work only and not in the drafts or those which are not included. 

• Today’s writings talk about internity of text and have thus freed from expression. However, it is not confined. 

• We also look for exterior deployed. Writing employees testing its limits of regularity and reversing orders. 

• It subverts, accepts, manipulates breaks its order and moves ahead. 

• Exalted emotions are not the base of writing though they compose it. Rather in today’s writing subject disappears. 

It is a kinship between writing and death that gives birth to the author. (Thus it contradicts with Barthe’s statement, “Author is dead, the reader is born.” 

Greek heroes die soon but become immortal. In Arabian Nights too, the author desires to remain immortal. So the immorality of the author and hero were an important part of older texts. They made the author important On the other hand, contemporary writings are linked to the extent of sacrificing the life. Today there is no representation of self. The text rather kills the author. In order to know the author, we will have to understand the singularity of his absence and his link to death. The absence of the author leads to the genuine possibility of change. Unlike Greek plays, there is no hero in today’s writing. 

  

Authors Name and Proper Name

According to Michael Foucault, the author’s name is a designation whereas the proper name is a description that tells about his ideas about nature and other things. It should be noted that the author’s name and the proper name are different. e.g. if we come to know that the grave of Shakespeare does not belong to him, it will not have any impact on Shakespeare. On the other hand, if we come to know that The Tempest was not written by Shakespeare, it will definitely have an impact on our views regarding Shakespeare. 

The Functions of Author 

1. The author is a part of a legal system. Initially, there was the concept of sacred and unsacred (when religion was dominant) texts. The text which was in accordance with the interest of dominant religious ideology was considered to be sacred while the others were unsacred. However, after the 18th century, the concept of legalizing the author came into existence and the author’s name became an important part of the texts. e.g. Today we can’t copy a book legally. We have to seek permission from the respective authors. 

2. Author’s function is not universal. It differs from discipline to discipline i.e. from subject to subject and from time to time. In earlier times the author’s name was not required in the literary works as they included moral stories that represented the societies interest and thus were acceptable whereas the scientific works were required to be associated to author’s name in order to authenticate them. However, after the 18th century, there was a complete shift. The literary texts were required to be associated with their authors and on the other hand, scientific texts were not required to be associated with them. e.g. We have to remember who wrote The Tempestbut not the one the one who gave a Mathematical Equation. 

3. Author’s function does not refer to a single individual but gives rise to multiple selves and a series of subjective position. For example, Marx or Freud writings are not just their own writings but also about how one particular text that they produced had the power to produce other texts and discourses or perhaps the entire paradigm of knowledge, radically new form of thinking, a new system of thought into being. 

4. Author’s function is not formed spontaneously. Rather he is constructed. Saint Jerome gave four criteria for this author’s function.

• Author’s name functions as a label of a certain standard level of quality. Those texts which do not meet this quality are eliminated. e.g. drafts. 

• Those texts which contradict the author’s ideas are eliminated. 

• Those texts which are against the writing style of the author are eliminated. 

• The events that happened after the death of the author are also eliminated.

Michel Foucault believed that there could be more authors function as well. According to him. 

• An author as the centre is constructed to establish a unified meaning from text. So the text itself is meaning. 

• An author can be displaced from the text but cannot be removed completely. 

• A text needs to be related to the larger group of texts or discourses. They cannot be studied in isolation. 

• The author is an ideological figure.

 Types of Authors

According to Michel Foucault, there are two types of authors: 

1) Transdiscursive: They are the fathers. e.g. Aristotle, Homer etc. 

2) Founder of Discursivity: Those who resolve complex expressions into simpler or more basic ones. e.g. 19th century Europeans.

 Foucault and Barthes 

 

• Barthes criticises author but Foucault problematizes him. 

• Barthes creates binaries (e.g. author vs reader) but Foucault considers the author as the construct of the reader. 

• Barthes philosophy is limited to the idea of literature and literary criticism whereas Foucault succeeds in extending problem from imaginative literature to the domain of non-fictional writings.

Thus, in the essay What is an Author? , Michel Foucault elaborated the concept of author and instead of declaring the death of author after creating the text, he questions the role of author. He discusses the major functions of author in detail.

The Storyteller @Walter Benjamin

•  Introduction 

The Storyteller is an essay written by a German Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin. He is famous for his work The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. The Storyteller is a discussion on the stories of Russian writer Nikolai Leskov. It represents Benjamin's views on: 

1) Stories and Storytelling 

2) Novels and Writing 

The essay lists what Benjamin considers to be the primary characteristics of the storyteller and examines each one in turn, both in theoretical and historical terms and as evidenced by the fiction of Leskov. Benjamin examines the sources of storytelling, analyzes its basic characteristics, points out its differences from other similar narrative forms, suggests what in human experience gives it its most basic authority, and laments nostalgically its inevitable passing away in the modern world. 

•  Nature of Story Telling 

The first criteria of storytelling Benjamin describes is its oral nature; moreover, he says, of those who write down stories the best ones are those who most closely stick to a simulation of this oral source. Benjamin says there are two basic types of oral storytellers- 

1) Those who come from afar and tell of their adventures (embodied in the figure of the travelling seaman) 

2) Those who stay at home and tell of events there (as represented by the stationary farmer.)

The second characteristic of the storyteller is an orientation toward practical interests;  all stories contain something useful, Benjamin argues, whether that useful  information is obvious and on the surface or whether it is embedded within the narrative in some way. Thus, stories do not derive from idle gossip or even from the  need to recount interesting experiences, but rather they spring from a basic human  need to recount real-life examples of trying to cope with the mystery of human reality. 

• Decline of Storytelling 

However, storytelling is dying out, says Benjamin; we no longer seem to have the ability to exchange experiences. He offers several historical and sociological reasons for storytelling's demise. The most basic reason for the death of storytelling is the fact that the communicability of experience itself is dying out; thus storytelling, which always offers counsel, has no more place in the modern world. Indeed, wisdom itself, which Benjamin defines as counsel woven into the fabric of life and thus which has its origins in storytelling, is dying out. This process, which Benjamin links to the increasingly secular forces of history, have gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech. 

• The Emergence of Novel 

The rise of the novel is one of the primary symptoms of the decline of storytelling, Benjamin suggests. For the novel is quite different from the story in that it neither comes from the oral tradition, nor does it go into it. Whereas the birthplace of the story is the teller's experience, the novel begins with the solitary self. Whereas the story springs from orality, the novel is bound to the form of a book. Whereas the storyteller takes his story from experience, either his own or what he has heard from others, the novelist is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concern. 

• Information and Storytelling 

Furthermore, Benjamin says, another form of communication has come to predominate in the modern world which threatens storytelling even more seriously than the novel; that is, "information," by which Benjamin means primarily the information of the news media. The difference between the forms of storytelling and forms of news information, argues Benjamin, is that whereas storytelling always had a validity that required no external verification, information must be accessible to immediate verification. Storytelling differs from information in that storytelling does not aim to convey the pure essence of the experience in some distilled way, but rather imbues the story with the life of the storyteller. Aspects of the storyteller cling to the story; this is the reason why many storytellers begin with the circumstances by which they have gained access to the story they are about to tell. 

This distinction between storytelling and information points to one of the primary differences between the "truth" of story and the truth of other forms of explanation characteristic of discursive writing. Whereas, in such forms of discourse as history, sociology, psychology, etc, the aim of the work is to abstract from concrete experience so that a distilled discursive meaning remains, in story, the truth is somehow communicated by a recounting of the concrete experience itself in such a way that the truth is revealed by the details of the story, not by abstract explanation. 

The story has a compactness that defies psychological analysis; in fact the less  psychological shading the story has the more the listener will remember it and tell it  to someone else later on, says Benjamin.

Whereas story is borrowed from the miraculous and does not demand plausibility or  conformity to the laws of external reality, information must be plausible and conform  to such laws. When stories come to us through information, they are already loaded  down with explanation, says Benjamin; it is half the art of storytelling to be free from information Because the reader of story is free to interpret things the way he  understands them, story has an amplitude lacking in information.

Another basic difference between story and information is that whereas the value of  information does not survive the moment of its newness, a story is so concentrated  that it retains its truth power for a long time. Moreover, story stays in the memory  and compels the listener to tell it to someone. In fact, insists Benjamin, it might be  said that storytelling is the art of repeating stories, for when the rhythm of the story  seizes the reader he listens in such a way that the ability to retell it comes by itself. 

• Storytelling as an Art 

However, Benjamin does not spend the entire essay focusing on such external characteristics of story as how it is transmitted. He is also concerned with what gives storytelling its validity, since he insists that, unlike information, it does not require external verification. Instead, the story finds its validity in the awareness of death, says Benjamin. One's wisdom and real life, the very stuff of stories, become transmissible at the moment of death, and thus death is the sanction for whatever the storyteller tells, for death is storytelling's ultimate authority. However, since increasingly modern man has become distanced from the actual experience of death, Benjamin argues, we can see another reason why the art of storytelling is coming to an end. Whereas dying once was a public process for the individual, in modern times death has been pushed out of the perception of the living. In deriving its ultimate validity from death, Benjamin argues, story faces ultimate reality, not immediate reality; that is, story deals with man's most basic existential situation in the world.In describing the craftsmanship required of story, Benjamin cites Paul Valery, who notes that nature creates perfection through a long chain of causes; man once imitated nature, says Valery, by elaborating things to perfection, but he does so no longer. Modern man is only concerned with dealing with what can be abbreviated and abstracted; he is no longer concerned with telling stories by the layering of various retellings so that multiple experiences of storytellers can imbue the story with concrete human meaning.

Benjamin also sets up a distinction between the chronicler and the historian to clarify his definition of storytelling. Whereas the historian must explain the happenings he describes, the chronicler is content with displaying the events as models of the course of the world. Whereas the chronicler bases his tales on a divine plan of salvation and thus is relieved of the burden of explanation, the historian is bound to the abstraction process that explanation demands. The storyteller preserves the nature of the chronicle, Benjamin says, albeit, in a secularized form. 

• Storyteller and the Listener 

The most basic relationship between the storyteller and the listener, Benjamin argues, is the listener's need to retain the story so that he can reproduce it. There is a crucial difference between the way memory is manifested in the novel and the way it is manifested in the story, Benjamin says. Memory is that which creates the chain that passes story from one generation to the next, much as a web is created in which one story ties on to the next. What distinguishes memory in story from memory in the novel is the perpetuating "remembrance" of the novelist as contrasted with the short-lived "reminiscences" of the storyteller. Whereas the remembrance of the novel is bound to one hero and one journey, the reminiscences of the storyteller encompass many diffuse occurrences.

• The Heart of Storytelling 

As a result, story focuses on the relatively concrete "moral of the story," while the novel focuses on the more abstract "meaning of life." The first true storyteller, says Benjamin, is the teller of fairy tales, for the fairy tale provides good counsel. According to Benjamin, whereas realistic narrative forms such as the novel focus on the relatively limited areas of human experience that indeed can be encompassed by information, characters in fairy tales or stories encounter those most basic mysteries of human experience which cannot be explained by rational means, but which can only be embodied in myth. The wisest thing the fairy tale teaches is to meet the forces of the mythical world with cunning and high spirits. What the fairy tale, and therefore the tale, does is to tell us how to deal with all that which we cannot understand. 

• Teachers as Storytellers 

The storyteller is of the same company as that of teachers and sages, says Benjamin, for the storyteller has counsel for many based on a lifetime of experience. The gift of the storyteller is the gift of relating his life, for he is able to fashion the raw material of experience, both his own and the experience of others, in a solid and useful way. It is therefore unfortunate, says Benjamin, that storytelling, that is, the ability to exchange experiences is being slowly taken from us. 

• Conclusion 

To conclude, one can say the role of Storyteller was, is, and will always remain important in the society. The storyteller passes the cultural values, morals, experiences, etc. from generation to generation.

Literature@Christmas

 

Merry Christmas friends!! 

Let's try to connect this holy festival with learning. Let's try to go through some of the works in Literature dealing with Christmas or the importance of Christmas day directly or indirectly. 

Sharing just the names of such books which I came across while reading literature or about literature till date. 

1. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens 
2. The Gift of Magi by O Henry or William Sydney Porter 
3.  A Visit from St Nicholas by Clement Clarke Moore  
4. Journey of the Magi by T S Eliot 
5. The Dead by James Joyce 
6. The Man Who Forgot Christmas by Max Brand 
7. Letters from Father Christmas by J R R Tolkien 
8. Ending Up by Kingsley Amis

Click here to play the quiz 

Share in the comment box such other works which I might have missed!! 

Terry Eagleton's 'Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism'

Introduction

Eagelton’s essay, Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism, was first published in the New Left Review in 1983 in which his post Marxist analysis of literature is exposed. He accounts for capitalism influence on art and its role. The capitalist and late capitalist areas have seen two new forms of literature appear: modern and postmodern. The modern, Eagleton explains, 

“In bracketing off the real social world, establish[es] a critical, negating distance between itself and the ruling social order”

while postmodern works accepts the fact that it is a commodity and thus conflicts between its material reality and its aesthetic structure. Capitalism has turned art into a commodity, and after analysing this claim, the characteristics of modern and postmodern genres will be analysed, so as to understand literature’s role. 

Capitalism

• Definition 

Capitalism is about an economical and political system in which a country's trade and industries are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state. Capitalism includes private property, wage labour, voluntary exchange, a price system, and competitive markets. 

• Characteristics  

1. Rich become more rich, and poor become poorer. 
2. Zero role from the side of government to control the people of the society. 
3. Private ownership is ready to bring disaster in the society. 
4. Competition between the business class people which will ruin the daily 
5. wages for the labour class people.  

There are some positive effects of Capitalism. They are: 

1. Only consumers get benefit during capitalist movement. 
2. Efficiency will grow.  

• Effects on Literature

Art and literature have been influenced by some characteristics of late capitalism, such as virtual reality based on mass consumerism. Our society focuses on commodities sold to and ideologically integrated by the consumer:

“The commodity is less an image in the sense of a “reflection” than an image of itself, its entire material being devoted to its own self-presentation”.

Art has become centred on its own image, role and place within society, because it has somehow lost its utopian role of mirroring the world, as if capitalism has perverted its function: 

“If the unreality of the artistic image mirrors the unreality of its society as a whole, then it is to say that it mirrors nothing real and so does not really mirror at all.” 

 Modernism

• Characteristics

1. All traditions were vanished during the modern era.  
2. Technologicaland scientific invasions became more advanced during modern era. 
3. People became ready to adopt the new culture and start avoiding the actual culture.
4. Individualism emerged on a wide platform. 
5. Modernism emerged as an international movement. 
6. All traditions were vanished and people start thinking about the future orientation by killing the deep roots of past.

• Major Themes 

1. Doubt and quarry first time raised in the field of literature during modern era. 
2. Personal issues and psychological condition of the society used to reflect in modern literature.
3. Unbelievable imaginations flourished during modern era. 
4. First time in the history of mankind, human beings started questioning the existence of God. 

• Effects on Literature

Eagleton uses de Man’s deconstructivist theory to define modernism:

"Literature defines and pre-empts its own cultural institutionalisation by textually introjecting it, hugging the very chains which bind it, discovering its own negative form of transcendence in its power of literally naming, and thus partially distancing, its own failure to engage in the real.” 

Modernism attempts at representing the real, but cannot do so and raises a paradox: it “resists commodification” but is nonetheless part of it, thus part of the social and cultural superstructure of society, which it denies. Denying being part of the capitalist mass commodity is the very core of modern failure to represent the real. 

Post-Modernism

• Characteristics 

1. Culture become the prominent part of the Post-Modernism with logical reason. Writers try to use cultural parodies. 

2. Writers emphasised on fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives, and random Reformation materials one can find in literature. 

3. A rejection of High and Low, and the Popular Culture become the choice of materials to produce the literary art. 

4. Poetry seems became more documentary (T S Eliot) and prose become more Poetics (e.g. James Joyce and Virginia Woolf) 

5. In this movement of Post-Modernism, the objectivity provided by the third person narrators with fixed narrative point of views and clear cut moral positions. 

6. Post-Modernist writers change their tendency towards the reflectivity or the self consciousness about the production of art. Because of this they become more attentive towards their own status as a production owner as something constructed and consumed in particular ways. 

7. Like modern writers, all post modern writers follow the same ideas like rejection of boundaries, rigid genre distinctions, etc. They emphasize on parody, irony and easily taking literature with their playfulness. 

•  Effects on Literature 

Postmodernism appears as a more cynical genre. Some of its features are the blurring of boundaries, pastiche and grotesque. It does not attempt to represent the world, since it is virtual, and would thus fail to describe it. Postmodernism seems to be very different from modernism on the ground that:

“If the work of art really is a commodity, it might as well admit it” and “become aesthetically what it is economically”.

Eagleton also suggests that postmodersism aims at parodying the commodity production, without adding any meaning in it; if meaning was added in the pastiche, making it parody, it would serve to alienate the self from reality, and according to postmodern thought, there is no reality it can be alienated from. All these features aim at empting the social content of art.

Conclusion

Thus, Eagleton in his essay Capitalism, Modernism, and Post-Modernism, assessed the features of literature genres characteristic of capitalist stages, in order to draw a critical and theoretical approach of literature. 

Dhvani

 Introduction 

In Indian Poetics, scholars had different view points about kavya that is Literature. So they found different schools of thought I.e. Rasa, Alamkara, Dhvani, Riti, Guna Dosa, Vakrokti Aucitya, and so on. 

Discussion on Dhvani 

Dhvanyaloka by Anandvardhana 

Abhinav  Gupta has discussed the theory of Dhvani aptly but it was Anandvardhana who has first time discussed the theory of Dhvani systematically in his work Dhvanyaloka. 

Dhvani 

That kind of poetry wherein the conventional meaning renders itself secondary or the conventional word renders it's meaning secondary and leads to the suggested or implied meaning is designated as Dhvani or suggestive poetry. 

Suggested meaning may be of three kinds: 

An idea 

A figure of speech 

An emotion 

Based on this, Anandvardhana classifies Dhvani into three types: 

1. Vastu Dhvani 

Indirect expression of theme 

Examples: 

The Thought Fox by Ted Hughes 

All the World's Stage by William Shakespeare 

2. Alamkara Dhvani 

Indirect expression with the use of figures of speech

Example: 

The Thought Fox by Ted Hughes (use of metaphor) 

3. Rasa Dhvani 

Indirect expression of emotion or rasa realization 

Example: 

When I have Fear I May Cease to Be by John Keats 

Dhvani, Vakrokti and De familiarization 

In Vakroktijivita Kuntaka denied the independent existence of Dhvani and included it under Vakrokti or Striking mode of speech His concept of Vakrokti is also resembling Dhvani but what makes him different is that he explained in detailed obliquity at six levels.  

Dhvani resembles the concept of de familiarization in Russian Formalism as both talk about presentation of known things into striking, indirect or unfamiliar ways. 

Types of Poetry: 

Based on Dhvani, Anandvardhana classifies poetry into three types: 

1. Uttam Kavya 

A poetry which has thoroughly indirect meaning or highly suggestive. 

Example: 

The Thought Fox by Ted Hughes 

2. Madhyam Kavya 

Partly suggestive poetry- not entirely suggestive but not thoroughly direct expression. 

Example: 

As I Walked Out One Evening by W H Auden 

In this poem one can see the mingling of simple as well as suggestive or indirect or connotative language in one poem. 

3. Adham Kavya 

A poetry which has no indirect expression. Even a person having no deep knowledge of language can easily understand the meaning. 

Example: 

The famous nursery rhyme 

 

Jack and Jill went up the Hill