Report on a Presentation in Research Pursuit: Samvad – A Faculty Forum

Samvad – A Faculty Forum

Report on a Presentation in Research Pursuit

Date: 19^rd March, 2016 | Venue: Board Room, MC301

Organized by   Department of Communication Skills,

      Marwadi Education Foundation's Group of Institutions - Rajkot 

Samvad – A Faculty Forum, Department of Communication Skills, MEFGI organized A Presentation in Research Pursuit on Dr. Vishal Bhadani’s Ph.D.: “Violence’ and ‘Space’: Perspectives on Post 1970 Indian Novels on Communal Riots”. ‘A Presentation in Research Pursuit’ is a platform provided to the faculties for discussion of the research they are pursuing. In today’s era, research is the most vital requirement and valued achievement. Higher education institutes are expected to be the platform for engaging oneself into research. Keeping in mind the need of the time and objectives of higher education, such platform has been formed to delve in to the research being pursued.

 

The above said session has been organized as per the below details.

Theme:

PhD Topic

‘Violence’ and ‘Space’: Perspectives on Post 1970 Indian Novels on Communal Riots

Speaker:

Dr. Vishal Bhadani

Department of Communication Skills, MEFGI

The presentation session is structured into two parts. In the first part, the research gives detailed presentation while Q&A and discussion takes place between the presenter and the audience in the later part. In the first part of this presentation, Dr. Vishal Bhadani made his presentation defining the title of his research and introducing the select literary works he has studied as a part of his research. He then defined the terms ‘violence’ and ‘space’ and located these ideas into the select five novels: 1) Tamas (1972) by Bhishm Sahani, 2) Curfew in the City (1988) by Vibhuti Narayan Rai, 3) Lajja (1993) by Taslima Nasreen, 4) Riot (2001) by Shashi Tharoor, 5) Partition (2004) by Kamleshwar.

He explained the term talked about ‘communal violence’, its history, nature and its sudden eruptions at times. Then, explaining the term ‘space’, he talked about ‘Physical Space’, ‘Sacred Space’, ‘Historical Space’, ‘Heterotopia’, ‘Political Space’, ‘Socio-Psychological Space’, and ‘Curfew as Controlling Space’. He contextualized these terms/themes in the select novels set and written after 1970. Further, sharing his observations, he illustrated the way communal violence in India, specifically after 1970, has been depicted in the literary works.

After his presentation, the session was left open for Q&A and discussion. In the latter part, few questions were asked by the audience and answered by the speaker. Then, Dr. Sunil Sagar, Head of the Department, gave his prominent remarks on the presentation. He also questioned the research and asked questions about the condition of research in English Studies now. His questions and doubts have also instigated another session specifically on the quality of research in English Studies which may be panned soon.

The session was completed with some important take-home points for research.

 

ELT and Caste, for example

ELT and Caste, for example

Some questions

The gamut of research on ELT looks at language learning and teaching in isolation which adversely affects the objective of ELT. No discipline can afford to operate itself cut off from the rest which is why there has to be an agreement among the educationists from all the other spheres as well on what they call language learning. Otherwise, no matter what efforts ELT practitioners lend their hands to, the desired result is likely to be an early morning dream; you pull yourself to catch it and there you wake up amusingly building castles in the air. Take a look at the following questions:

1. What is the relationship between students' existing worldview with your language teaching strategies?

2. Do various caste-practices affect students language learning capacities?

3. Does the current political system support your ideals of language teaching?

4. Is there a clash between the cultural expectations and what you teach under the pretext of English?

5. Have you ever questioned the promises that technology has made about ELT?

6. Have your ever tried to measure the increasing decline in the overall curiosity among the language learners?

7. Do you think the number of hours you spend with your language learners affects their language learning capacity?

8. Where does ELT stand in the list of institutional priority?

9. Do you contemplate on your own teaching impact? 

10. What if some day you realize that all the theories, methods and approaches of language teaching are not working at all? 

 

A boy got annoyed with theory and he said,

A boy got annoyed with theory and he said,

(Excerpt from Valentine Cunningham’s Theory, What theory? )

vishal bhadani

 [Here is a selection from Valentine Cunningham’s “Theory, What theory discussing the ambiguous state of theory and how it has come to the academic world (read literature teaching departments, English departments in particular) as big show for keeping the ball rolling to run the university departments. I believe that on one hand when people are uncritically obsessed with theory, such discourses provide us with a new perspective of looking at theory. However, I am also skeptical about the birth of a new theory – Theory against Theory. A solid read.]  

“Theorists don’t like the charge of untheoretical messiness, and work hard to disprove it. Some have tried to lean on etymology for the strict meaning of their work, and invoke the originating Greek word theoros, spectator. So theory becomes spectator work, what onlookers and audiences do.

What’s embraced by the label theory, what I mean by Theory, is what you expect to find and indeed do find in those proliferating university courses  called “Theory” or “Introductions to Theory”; what you find in the exploding field of handy student handbooks and textbooks. The scope is, of course, Structuralism and Feminism and Marxism and Reader-Response and Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction and Poststructuralism and Postmodernism and New Historicism and Postcolonialism—the concerns of the various sections of Julian Wolfreys’ volume, Literary Theories: A Reader and Guide (1999), in the order in which they appear. The modem gurus of Theory on these lines are, of course, the likes of Mikhail Bakhtin,Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Michel Foucault, non-anglophone thinkers all, but most notably French-speakers, the French men and women who poured the Word from Paris (as John Sturrock has aptly put it)3 into eager anglophone ears from the 1960s onwards.

For Theorists have indeed managed to pull off what is, by any standards, an astounding coup, or trick; have managed to wedge together a great many various subjects, concerns, directions, impulses, persuasions, and activities that are going on in and around literature, and squeeze them all under the one large sheltering canopy of “Theory.” They have managed to compel so many divergent wings of what they call Theory under the one roof, persuaded so many sectional variants of interpretative work to sink their possible differences around a common conference table, in the one seminar with the sign Theory on its door. So while setting their faces, usually, against Grand Narratives and Keys to All Mythologies, as delusive and imperialist, and all that, Theorists have managed to erect the Grandest Narrative of all—Theory—the greatest intellectual colonizer of all time.How this wheeze was pulled off, how you can have the political and the personal subjects of literature—representations of selfhood and class and gender and race: the outside-concerns, the outward look of writing, the descriptive and documentary, the reformist intentions, and the ideological instrumentality of writing—envisioned and envisionable as part and parcel of the often quite opposite and contradictory functions of writing—the merely formal, or the technically linguistic, or (as often) a deeply inward, world-denying, aporetic writing activity—rather defies ordinary logic. Foundationalism and anti-foundationalism, shall we say roughly the Marxist reading on the one hand, and the deconstructionist on the other, make awkward bed-partners, you might think. But Theory deftly marries them off, or at least has them more or less cheerfully all registered as guests in the same hotel room.

For all that, theorizing about literature is always a palimpsest. Below the latest lines you can always still read the older inscribings. Theoretical memory is always stronger than Theory’s would-be revolutionaries hope. The present trend of Theory is always a simultaneously present archeology or paleography. Theory’s archive is perpetually open. As with the media of communication. We move from script to print to IT, but I still start writing this with a pen and pencil. Now I fly, now I drive my car, now I ride my bike, now I go on foot.”

Source: Valentine Cunningham’s “Theory, What theory?” Published in ‘Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent’ edited by Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral, Columbia University Press, New York, 2005.