Prakruti Bhatt's Assignments

Highlighting "Man's first disobedience", and his consequent fall from heaven, John Milton's Paradise Lost, is and always will be one of the greatest epics of English literature. Milton's epic provides the readers with a human perspective to the original Biblical narrative of the incident, with God at the center. Not only does Milton place Adam and Eve at the center but also tries to argue that they themselves were responsible for their fall (specially Eve). Whereas, Satan is only a medium, believing that they could have avoided his words, and in the process blames Eve, since she was the one who was charmed first, for mankind's fall from heaven. Book 9 of the work highlights the argumentative skill of Milton. It is his artistic skill which gives intellectual arguments to the two usually marginalized characters, Eve and Satan. This instance itself leads a lot of scholars as well as students to analyze Milton's epic, from a lot of new perspectives, in...

Every turn of life gives us a teacher, so much so that, sometimes the moment or our own mistakes become our teacher. And each teacher has something new to offer, disregarding the idea of whether we like the teacher or not. Speaking more specifically, the best teacher, in my opinion, is the one with whom the students can relate, the one who can consider the students his\her friends. On other hand a teacher is also someone who insists time and again the students to develop their thinking faculties and in turn make them open minded. The reason behind these generalizations is the picture in my mind of my favorite teacher. I won't name her, for no reason😅. She taught me literary criticism, during my bachelor's course in literature. May be this was also one of the reasons why, as mentioned earlier, she was able to open up our "closed minds". Her famous words before beginning the lecture were,  "books, pens and brains out". This was because, the criticism lecture...

 Whether it is,  " To be or not to be that is the question" or "What a piece of work is man?", Hamlet, just like Shakespeare's other works, especially his four tragedies, is known for its universal appeal and therefore has been adapted to films, abridged books, and a lot more, through which its message can reach the common populace. And one of the very popular mediums to do so, as mentioned earlier, is films. Since the beginning of cinema, it has been a common practice to make films based on classical texts of literature of any language. So, the reason for the existence and popularity of so many versions and adaptations of Shakespeare's works, and especially his tragedies, becomes quiet clear. It is a common practice, therefore for critics, scholars as well as readers or students to analyze or determine the level at which a specific film version of a classical text remains faithful to the original. A clear answer to this question, in my opinion, is that, th...

Whether it was religion or love, the metaphysical poets had their own way of writing poetry on topics concerning the human experience. Though history doesn't speak much about them, their contribution to English literature speaks a lot. Anyways, the poet I'm going to talk about is George Herbert, one of the major metaphysical poets, with special emphasis on the critical analysis of his Love 3 . Love 3 is the last poem of Herbert's poetry collection "The Temple". Written in the form of a dialogue, the poem is the third in the series of love poems of the collection. Spending the later years of his life in religious activities, George Herbert, through this collection, wanted to draw his readers' attention to the experience of true eternal love i,e God's love. Which is why, in the earlier two poems, he explains how, the love for God is higher than the human experience of love, which mostly is an "usurping lust", in his opinion. Love 3, being the la...

The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe, is a play dealing with the various socio-religious conflicts of the Renaissance age. It is also known for its portrayal of the constant psychological conflict inside the mind of the protagonist, who wavers to decide whether to set upon the path of virtue (God/religion) or vice (Lucifer/necromancy). As a revolt against the dark ages when religion was at the center of life, Renaissance is known for its emphasis on human life and effort. Almost all the renaissance plays focus on the idea that humans suffer the consequences of their own actions and therefore fate or destiny, which was supposed to be the cause of an individual's present situation, during the dark ages, was denied this power. Here, in the play, the protagonist, Doctor Faustus suffers downfall, not because his destiny had designed it so. But because he was arrogant of the amount knowledge he possessed. Also because he forgets the main...

Certain words like discipline, morality, truth, etc are highly subjective in my opinion. Especially, the word truth, which has remained highly ambiguous even for the greatest thinkers. And let me remind you that this ambiguity has resulted into horrifying circumstances at times as well. The reason for this sudden highly philosophical speculation is the fact that often what is considered as the universal or general truth is not the actual reality. Most of the times in today's world the general or universal truth is a 'make believe '. The concept or meaning of the word post truth is, in my opinion related to this idea. What I really found interesting while reading about post truth is the fact that not only has the word truth gone through huge changes in interpretation but also the prefix 'post', as is explained in this line : " Rather than simply referring to the time after a specified situation or event  – as in post-war or post-match – the prefix  in post-tru...